Taylor Schmalz Reframes Anna Jarvis for Mother's Day 2026
Taylor Schmalz will use mother’s day 2026 to push a different reading of the holiday’s founder. At Historic St. George, the director of collections and interpretations says Anna Jarvis wanted mothers to have an intimate day that celebrated them.
Schmalz will share that story at the Historic St. George Museum and Archives at the 19th Firstival, a weekly day party series built around things that happened in Philadelphia before anywhere else in the country. The presentation puts Anna Jarvis’ intent ahead of the version of the holiday many people now associate with commercialization.
Anna Jarvis in Philadelphia
Anna Jarvis founded Mother’s Day in honor of her own mother, Anna Maria Reeves Jarvis. Before moving to Philadelphia around 1904 with her brother Claude, Jarvis had already seen a family legacy shaped by loss: her mother gave birth to 13 children in Grafton, West Virginia, and only four survived to adulthood.
In the years before the Civil War, Grafton organized women into Mother’s Day Work Clubs to fight the diseases that killed young children. After she arrived in Philadelphia, Jarvis joined the Old St. George’s Methodist Church and worked in the advertising department at Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company.
May 9, 1905
Jarvis’ mother died on May 9, 1905. Before she died, Reeves Jarvis asked her daughter to memorialize the invisible work of mothers, and Jarvis began a letter-writing campaign to politicians and city officials calling for a day specifically for mothers.
That campaign took a public turn on Sunday May 10, 1908, when Jarvis sent 500 carnations to her mother’s home church in West Virginia and stood before a group in the Wanamaker Building auditorium to thank mothers for all they do. John Wanamaker, James Elverson and Henry J Heinz supported her effort.
White carnations in 1908
The first public celebration of Mother’s Day took place that same day. An article published May 11, 1908 said many churches used white carnations in their decorations, many houses throughout Philadelphia had bunches of white carnations in their windows, and white carnations appeared in cemeteries as a silent witness of unending grief.
That Philadelphia scene is the part Schmalz wants people to remember. Jarvis is often linked to the holiday’s later commercialization, but Schmalz is centering the founder’s original aim: a private, intimate day for mothers, rooted in the city where the first public celebration unfolded.
