Gift Pastor returns with a book from West Virginia shrine where the holiday began

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In honour of the 100th anniversary of Mother's Day, Saint John has acquired a little piece of the holiday's history.

Noel Chenier/Telegraph-Journal

Erik Kraglund, right, presents regional director Fundy Library Region Ian Wilson with the book ‘Mothers Day and the Mothers Day Church’ by Howard H. Wolfe outside the Saint John Free Public Library.

On a recent visit to Grafton, W.Va., Quispamsis pastor Erik Kraglund stopped by the Mother's Day Shrine, a former Methodist church where the first Mother's Day service was held in 1908.

"I told the staff there that I was from Canada, and they were quite enthused about it," Kraglund says. They presented him with a book, Howard H. Wolfe's Mother's Day And The Mother's Day Church, and asked him to give it to a Saint John library. The book will be added to the collection at the Saint John Free Public Library's Central Branch in Market Square.

Mother's Day is celebrated in different forms around the world, but the North American holiday was created by Anna Jarvis, a Grafton native, in 1908. Jarvis' mother, Ann Marie, was a teacher and activist who travelled throughout West Virginia educating townsfolk about sanitation. During the American Civil War, she organized a band of women who aided wounded soldiers on both sides of the war.

Ann Marie died on May 9, 1905. Three years later, the first Mothers' Day service was held in the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, where Ann Marie had taught Sunday school for more than 20 years, to coincide with the anniversary of her death.

"She did a lot for the people in the area," Kraglund says. "(Jarvis) just felt that her mother should be honoured - and that all mothers should be honoured for the sacrifices they made over the years."

Jarvis lobbied for national observance of each second Sunday in May as Mother's Day, and with the aid of a longtime friend, then-president Woodrow Wilson, the holiday became official in 1914.