On May 12, 1907, Anna Jarvis held a memorial service for her late mother in Grafton, West Virginia, launching her national campaign for Mother's Day.
On May 12, 1907, exactly two years after the death of her mother Ann Reeves Jarvis, Anna Jarvis organized a private memorial gathering at her home in Philadelphia and helped arrange a memorial service in her mother's honor. This event is widely cited as the symbolic launch of her personal crusade to establish a national day honoring mothers.
Anna had long wished to create a holiday that would recognize the sacrifices mothers made for their children, inspired directly by her own mother's Sunday School lessons and her wish, expressed in prayer, that someone would someday found a memorial day for mothers. Following her mother's death in 1905, Anna dedicated herself entirely to fulfilling that wish, giving up other pursuits to campaign full-time for the observance.
This 1907 memorial served as an important precursor to the more famous public service held the following year, on May 10, 1908, at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia — the church where her mother had taught Sunday School. The 1907 gathering set in motion Anna's extensive lobbying efforts, letter-writing campaigns, and public relations initiatives targeting churches, businesses, and government officials, which would culminate in the holiday's national recognition. It marked the beginning of one of the most successful grassroots campaigns for a national holiday in American history, one that would ultimately transform the American calendar and, ironically, the commercial landscape that Jarvis would later come to despise.