a resolution to set aside one day annually to memorialize the Confederate dead. The secretary of the association, Mrs. Charles J. Williams, was directed to write a letter inviting the ladies of every Southern state to join them in the observance. The letter was written in March 1866 and sent to representatives of all of the principal cities in the South, including Atlanta, Macon, Montgomery, Memphis, Richmond, St. Louis, Alexandria, Columbia, and New Orleans. This was the beginning of the influential work by ladies' organizations to honor the war dead. The date for the holiday was selected by Elizabeth Rutherford Ellis. She chose April 26, the first anniversary of Confederate General Johnston's final surrender to Union General Sherman at Bennett Place, North Carolina. For many in the South, that act marked the official end of the Civil War. In 1868, General John A. Logan, commander in chief of the Union Civil War Veterans Fraternity called the Grand Army of the Republic, launched the Memorial Day holiday that is now observed across the entire United States. General Logan's wife said he had borrowed from practices of Confederate Memorial Day. She wrote that Logan "said it was not too late for the Union men of the nation to follow the example of the people of the South in perpetuating the memory of their friends who had died for the cause they thought just and right." While two dozen cities across the country claim to have originated the Memorial Day holiday, Bellware and Gardiner firmly establish that the holiday began in Columbus. In The Genesis of the Memorial Day Holiday in America, they show that the Columbus Ladies Memorial Association's call to observe a day annually to decorate soldiers' graves inaugurated a movement first in the South and then in the North to honor the soldiers who died during the Civil War. 20th century With the expansion of the city, leaders established Columbus College, a two-year institution, which later evolved into Columbus State University, now a comprehensive center of higher learning and part of the University System of Georgia. The city government and the county consolidated in 1971, the first such consolidation in Georgia and one of only 16 in the U.S. at the time. Expanding on its industrial base of textile mills, the city is the home of the headquarters for Aflac, Synovus, and TSYS. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the