GRAFTON, W.Va. – Cousins Candice Dady and Marilyn Raschka were touring the Anna Jarvis Birthplace Museum a couple days before Mother’s Day. Raschka, of Wisconsin, has visited two times previously, but it was Illinois-resident Dady’s first visit to the home where Anna Jarvis, founder of Mother’s Day, was born.

“I don’t think you ever spend a lot of time (thinking about) where Mother’s Day began,” Dady said. “You’ve just grown up with it. … It’s really interesting to hear how it really started.”

They admired the wealth of items in the house, including hats, shoes and dresses worn by Anna, family photos, an old piano Anna’s mother Ann – the inspiration for Mother’s Day – used to give lessons on, and pins, banners and postcards Anna used to promote Mother’s Day in the early days.

Olive Ricketts, museum director, calls the museum a “labor of love,” something she has worked on since being presented with the deed to the house in 1993. Ricketts has been cleaning up the property and adding things to the 5,050-item collection over the years, also building a pavilion across the street for Mother’s Day programs, and a gift shop nearby in 2001. She is on the board of Thunder on the Tygart Foundation, the 501(c)3 that owns the house and works to preserve its history as the birthplace of the founder of Mother’s Day.

A motherly inspiration

Ann Marie Reeves was born in Culpeper County, Virginia, the daughter of a minister. When her father moved her family to Philippi, West Virginia, she met Granville Jarvis, also the child of a minister, Ricketts said. The two were married in 1850.

After having their first two children, in 1854 they moved to the growing town of Webster, where Granville finished a partially built home and moved his family in, according to Ricketts. Across the street from that house, Granville set up his stable and mercantile business, the site of which is now the welcome center and parking lot for the house-turned-museum.

Throughout the museum, filled with items actually owned by the Jarvis family along with other period pieces, photographs line the walls and shelves, depicting the Jarvis family. Ricketts points out one of Ann in her later years in a wicker wheelchair, and talked about what a wonderful woman Ann was.

“(She) founded the Mother’s Day Work Clubs,” Ricketts said, explaining that there was a terrible plague that swept through the town, killing numerous children, including some of Ann’s own. Ann asked her brother, the well-known Dr. James Edmund Reeves, to come to the town to help stop the spread of the disease. He taught them to boil and sanitize everything, and the Mother’s Day Work Clubs helped teacher mothers about sanitary conditions.

When the Civil War broke out, the Jarvis home would become headquarters for General George B. McClellan. One of the rooms in the house is now decorated to portray some items from that time, including a canon used in the Battle of Philippi, a uniformed mannequin, and McClelland’s desk, with his glasses perched on top.

When the soldiers came to the town, Ricketts said Ann “doctored up” soldiers from both sides of the war.

“She saved a lot of lives during the whole four years of the Civil War,” Ricketts said of Ann. “She was a saint.”

Ricketts also explained that when the Civil War started, some of the local women’s husbands wanted to go with the North, and some with the South, but Ann told them to do what was best for themselves and their families.

“She got them to sign a pact that once the war was over they would come back together as a community,” Ricketts said. “She reminded them as soon as it ended.”

At the end of the war, she held a ceremony where songs were sung, she gave a speech, and men from both sides laid down their weapons.

“She just had a way with her that she was a good, Christian lady,” Ricketts said. “The condolence letters that Anna got said ‘your mother was always a gentle, gentile, soft-spoken woman.’”

Founder of a holiday

In 1864, Anna Jarvis was born in the house, the 10th child of the Jarvises, who in total had 14 children, with only four living to adulthood, according to Ricketts. She wouldn’t live in the house long, as the family moved out in 1868 and relocated to nearby Grafton.

Anna would eventually go to earn her degree in German from the Augusta Female Seminary, now known as Mary Baldwin University, in Staunton, Virginia. She came back home to teach school for seven years, Ricketts said, but eventually Anna went to Philadelphia, where her brother was living.

Ricketts notes that Anna never married and never had any children herself. She never even mentions dating or suitors in all her letters and diaries.

In 1902, Anna’s father Granville died, and she came back to Grafton to get her mother and her sister Lillian, taking them back with her to Philadelphia where she would care for her mother until she passed on May 9, 1905, Ricketts said.

At her mother’s funeral, Ricketts said Anna began thinking about her mother and the things she had said in her life.

“One of the things her mother repeatedly said all throughout Anna’s life was, ‘we need a day set aside for mothers to rest,’” Ricketts said. “It didn’t mean to have a holiday for us, buy us gifts or take us to dinner. It just meant let her have the whole day off, kick up her feet and you all take care of the problems.”

Anna, 38, went home from the funeral and got to work right away on making this happen.

Getting established

Anna immediately began writing letters to churches, organizations and legislators to figure out how to set a day aside for mothers, Ricketts said.

“One of the things she did in 1910 … was she wrote a letter to every governor of every state and asked if they would do something for mothers in their prospective states,” Ricketts said, adding that about nine did something in the first year.

But Anna received some opposition, mainly from men, Ricketts noted.

“I have thousands of letters that state, ‘Dear Miss Jarvis, we love and revere our mother, but she doesn’t need a day off. Leave it alone.’”

Wanting to honor her mother on the anniversary of her death, in 1908 Anna decided to have a service at the church where her mother taught Sunday School, the Andrews Methodist Church in Grafton. Ricketts said that though Anna didn’t attend the service, she did send over the program, as well as 500 carnations, her mother’s favorite flower. A service was held at 10 a.m. in Grafton, and another at 2 p.m. in Philadelphia.

Finally, in 1914, Anna’s letter writing and campaigning paid off, as President Woodrow Wilson signed Resolution 263 on May 8, 1914, making Mother’s Day a legal holiday to be observed on the second Sunday of May each year.

Memories live on

About four miles away from the Anna Jarvis Birthplace Museum is the Andrews Methodist Church, standing stoically in downtown Grafton. While regular services aren’t held there anymore, a Mother’s Day service takes place every year, at this site now known as the International Mother’s Day Shrine.

Inside, Docent Mary Wagner points out the room where Ann taught Sunday School for more than 25 years, the classroom number still visible above the door, though it is no longer used for that purpose. She walks around the tables set up for the weekend’s Mother’s Day celebration that takes place at the church annually. A service will be held upstairs in the sanctuary, which features its original pews, bright, stained glass windows and religious murals. Then in the downstairs hall, a reception will be held for about 100 to 150 people coming from near and far.

It’s one of the ways Anna’s efforts are remembered. She has also been immortalized at the West Virginia State Capitol, where there’s a bust of Anna. In 1932, when the newly built Capitol was dedicated, Anna was in attendance and dedicated the capitol to mothers everywhere, Ricketts said, adding that hers is the only first female bust on display in the building.

On the main level of the International Mother’s Day Shrine, a glass case contains items such as the pen that signed the Mother’s Day proclamation, presented to Anna by President Wilson.

Informational posters on the main level tell visitors the history of how Anna founded Mother’s Day, though also making note of several others who make claims on having invented the holiday.

However, Anna is largely the woman given the credit of having the holiday established, though it was something she would come to regret.

Founder’s disappointment

“Mother’s Day didn’t really turn out the way Anna wanted it to,” Wagner said. “She wanted it to be a day where everybody would just sit around and talk with family. Once she got things started, then the card companies, candy companies, the florists, they all wanted to make some money from it. She did not intend for it to happen like that. It made her upset. She tried to have a stop put to everything.”

When Anna sent carnations to the first Mother’s Day service in 1908, they each cost her a penny, Ricketts said. The next year, they were two cents each. The following year, they had gone up to five cents apiece, and she began to realize that companies were beginning to profit from the holiday, Ricketts said.

“She didn’t want it to be commercialized,” Ricketts said. “She actually was going door to door getting a petition signed to rescind Mother’s Day.”

The holiday being celebrated with gifts was not the intent Anna, nor her mother, had.

“She told people if you really love your mother you’ll write her a letter,” Ricketts said. “Don’t send her somebody else’s words, send her yours. Don’t buy candy because it gets eaten. Don’t send flowers because they die.”

Over the years, Ricketts said Anna wrote numerous letters to mercantiles, candy and card companies and florists, “telling them off.”

Unfortunately, Anna’s health eventually declined, and she was put in the Marshall Square Sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1943, where she eventually died in 1948.

Her memory lives in on Webster and Grafton, however, where two landmarks are working to educate others on Anna’s efforts and legacy, and to remind visitors of the original intent of Mother’s Day.

The Anna Jarvis Birthplace Museum is open between April 1 and Dec. 31, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and is located at 3576 Webster Pike, Grafton.

The International Mother’s Day Shrine is open from May to September, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, and is located at 11 E. Main St., Grafton.