North Andover Memorial Day Ceremony To Honor Civil War Veteran

North Andover will begin its Memorial Day Parade on Monday, May 30 at 10:15 a.m. The parade will start at the Common, and then will march up Salem St. towards Ridgewood Cemetery. Once the parade arrives at the cemetery between 10:45 a.m. and 11 a.m., services will begin at Ridgewood.

The special guest speaker for the ceremony will be Gerry Izzo, a former CW04 Black Hawk Pilot, who was engaged in the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, where two Special Forces soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor in a posthumous ceremony.

Medal of Honor recipient Frank S. Gile will also be honored, as he fought for the Union during the Civil War. Gile lived in North Andover at the time he joined the Navy and as a landsman on the USS Lehigh.

While supporting Union troops from Charleston Harbor on Nov. 16, 1863, the USS Lehigh hit a sandbar and subsequently was attacked with heavy fire from Fort Moultrie. After many attempts to rescue to the ship failed, Gile and two others rowed a small boat from the Lehigh to the USS Nahant, trailing a line that was attached to the Lehigh so it could be towed off the sandbar.

Memorial Day is directly linked to the Civil War. So many Americans died during the war that decorating their graves became an annual tradition. Over time, both northern and southern tradions began to merge which gave way to Decoration Day, which eventually morphed into Memorial Day as we know it today.

If rain occurs on Memorial Day, the ceremony will likely be cancelled and moved to the North Andover School auditorium.

Photo courtesy of Sean McMenemy via Flickr