The first memorial service in Illinois, and one of the first in the nation to honor those who had died in the Civil War, took place at Woodlawn Cemetery on April 29, 1866, when more than 200 veterans gathered at the old Blue Church on what is now East Jackson Street, where Methodist minister J.W. Lane greeted them and Colonel E.J. Ingersoll and General John A. Logan led a procession to the cemetery. During the service, Logan declared that every man's life belongs to his country and that no man has a right to refuse when his country calls for it. After the war, Logan became commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, and impressed by the observance at Woodlawn Cemetery, he signed General Order No. 11 establishing May 30, 1868, as Memorial Day, hoping it would be kept up from year to year. By 1888, Memorial Day had become a legal holiday in twelve northern states and later throughout the country, while Carbondale continued the custom with annual observances at Woodlawn Cemetery. Woodlawn Cemetery, designed by Carbondale founder Daniel Brush in 1853 with two concentric pathways for horse and wagon access, contains 217 plots on about 2.5 acres and more than 400 grave sites, including many Union and Confederate soldiers and other prominent local residents, and its last burial occurred in 1954. Among those connected with the cemetery and Carbondale's early history were founder Daniel Harmon Brush, town founders Dr. William Richart and John Asgill Conner, Civil War veteran Edmund Newsome, James Monroe Campbell, Alexander M. Jenkins, and Lewis Chambers, the only African American identified by name as buried there. The cemetery also includes a commemorative monument to 30 freed slaves who died of smallpox in 1864 soon after coming from the South to Carbondale and were buried in an unmarked area, and it is associated with a sarcophagus near the center of the cemetery that local tradition links either to a young woman from Vicksburg, Mississippi, or to Lieutenant Colonel John Mills of the Union Army.