Spectators and veterans alike gathered together in Opelika in remembrance and celebration of Armistice Day.
After a special breakfast held at Niffers at the Tracks in Opelika, veterans and their families moved to Courthouse Square to commemorate the centennial of the Armistice, a ceasefire that signaled the end of WWI, Saturday morning.
Armistice Day is often overshadowed by the more known Veterans Day, but the significance of the holiday isn’t lost on Marty Olliff, a professor of history and director of the Wiregrass Archives at the Dothan Campus.
Olliff spoke about the importance of Armistice Day and how it differs from Veterans Day in both meaning and origin.
“Armistice Day is about peace, the kind of peace that we don’t think about now,” Olliff said. “It was a peace based on detesting war from the very pits of our soul.”
Olliff said Armistice Day was created to remind the world that even after a great war and the devastation the whole world felt there could still be peace.
“Veterans Day helps us understand that the people who fight the wars are rememberable as individuals,” Olliff said. “Rather than just a symbol of our detestation of war, that’s the difference.”
Tim Maggart, a U.S. Army Veteran and award-winning singer and songwriter from Phenix City, and the group he founded, The New American Freedom Train Band, performed on stage in honor of those who have served in the nation's military and those fallen in duty.
“We are compelled to never forget, that while we may indulge in our daily pleasures, there are others that have endured the agonies of pain, deprivation and death,” Maggart said. “Let us remember and never forget their sacrifice. May they and their families ever be watched over and protected.”
The Opelika Ovations, a high school student choir, lead the crowd in the national anthem. The choir opened the ceremony and performed a medley of ‘My Country Tis of Thee’ and ‘America the Beautiful’.
All the while a bald eagle from the Southeastern Raptor Center stood watch over the ceremony.
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