Did you attend a Veterans Day parade or ceremony yesterday? If you did, you continued a century-old tradition in Lawrence County.

Veterans Day is observed on November 11. It has been known as Veterans Day since 1954. Prior to that, it was celebrated in the United States as Armistice Day, to commemorate the Armistice that ended World War I. That armistice began on November 11, 1918.

Armistice Day was celebrated in a number of ways in Lawrence County in its early days. This ad features the different activities which happened in the community of West Point for Armistice Day 1924. It included a number of common festivities for the time that might seem strange to us today, including a fat man’s race for men over 200 pounds, a contest to see who could climb a greasy pole, a contest to see who could catch and hold a greasy pig, a “best physically developed baby” contest, and an ugliest man contest.

More familiar activities that day included a “parade by all ex-soldiers,” a free dinner for all ex-soldiers of any war, and a “sham battle” by ex-soldiers. The sham battle was a battle reenactment. These were popular events for Armistice Day, and they typically featured veterans who had actually participated in the conflicts they were reenacting.

Three years later the Lawrenceburg American Legion sponsored a “sham” reenactment of the Battle of the Marne at the fair grounds in Lawrenceburg for Armistice Day. That reenactment included “tanks, fireworks, infantry, machine guns, flashing bayonets…to the accompaniment of crashing artillery and musketry.” The event was watched by a huge crowd that the Lawrence ‘Democrat’ said “packed and jammed the big grand stand at the fair grounds.”

Although we don’t know who won the sham battle at West Point in 1924, the tradition of a parade to honor veterans on November 11 is still alive and well in Lawrence County.