Anna Jarvis lost her mother on May 9, 1905. Three years later, on the anniversary of that loss, she organized a memorial service at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia - the church where her mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis, had taught Sunday school for more than two decades. Anna handed out white carnations, her mother's favorite flower. She called the service Mother's Day. Within four years, forty-five states, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Canada, and Mexico were celebrating it. By 1914, President Woodrow Wilson had signed a proclamation making it official. The small brick Romanesque Revival church in Grafton became the holiday's mother church. Today it is the International Mother's Day Shrine - a building dedicated to one daughter's grief that became the world's annual day for thanking mothers.
Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church was built in Grafton and dedicated on March 16, 1873 by Bishop Edward Gayer Andrews of the Methodist Episcopal Church - the man for whom the building was named. The dedication came at a moment when Grafton, a railroad town and B&O junction, was growing rapidly. Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis, an organizer and Sunday school teacher who had spent the Civil War leading women's clubs that nursed wounded soldiers of both sides, found the church a natural home for her work. She taught Sunday school here for twenty years. Her daughter Anna grew up in those pews, watching her mother gather women to do practical good work - public health campaigns, sanitation drives, support for new mothers in a region where infant mortality remained brutally high.
When Ann Maria died in 1905, Anna Jarvis was forty-one, unmarried, and devastated. The first Mother's Day memorial service at Andrews Methodist on May 10, 1908 was for her mother specifically. The second service that same day, organized by John Wanamaker in Philadelphia, brought a larger crowd. Anna pushed both as part of one campaign. She chose the second Sunday in May because, in 1908, it fell on the third anniversary of her mother's death. The white carnation became the holiday's symbol. Anna called for a national observance in 1909 and was astonished by how quickly states, then countries, adopted it. 'Where it will end must be left for the future to tell,' she wrote. 'That it will girdle the globe seems now certain.'
On May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed the proclamation that made Mother's Day official, calling on Americans to fly the flag on the second Sunday in May 'as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.' That was the victory Anna Jarvis had been working toward. What followed was a complication she had not foreseen. By the 1920s, florists, candy makers, and greeting card companies had commercialized her holiday to a degree that horrified her. Anna spent the rest of her life campaigning against the very commercialization that made the day popular. She organized boycotts. She filed lawsuits. She was once arrested for disturbing the peace at a Mother's Day candy industry convention. The day she had founded outgrew her.
On May 15, 1962, the congregation incorporated Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church as the International Mother's Day Shrine - formally dedicating the building to all mothers. On October 5, 1992, the shrine was designated a National Historic Landmark, the highest level of federal historic recognition. The church still functions as a religious and commemorative site, hosting special events on Mother's Day weekend and welcoming visitors year-round. The original building is intact - red brick, Romanesque Revival arches, and the sanctuary where Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis taught Sunday school and where Anna sat through her mother's death and began her campaign. The carnations passed out at services are still white, in keeping with Anna's original choice. The shrine remembers not just Ann Maria, but the broader tradition of women's organizing in Appalachia that her work represented.
Located at 39.34 degrees north, 80.02 degrees west, in Grafton, Taylor County, West Virginia. Best viewed from 2,500 to 4,000 feet AGL. The shrine is a single brick Romanesque Revival church in central Grafton - look for the cluster of older buildings near the rail corridor that has defined Grafton since the mid-nineteenth century. Nearest airports are North Central West Virginia (KCKB) at Clarksburg and Morgantown Municipal (KMGW). Grafton sits in the valley of the Tygart Valley River.