19081776 Club
Anna Jarvis fills her mother's church in Grafton; the first Mother's Day service begins
Three years after Ann Reeves Jarvis's death, her daughter leads worship at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church before the same congregation her mother once served.
Anna Jarvis had been campaigning for three years — since her mother Ann Reeves Jarvis died in 1905 — when she finally got her Sunday. On May 10, 1908, she organized a service of worship at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, filling the pews of the same congregation her mother had served. The holiday she fought to create would eventually be signed into law by Woodrow Wilson, celebrated in every U.S. state, and, to Jarvis's lasting bitterness, turned into exactly the commercialized spectacle she never intended…
