Crowd gathers at Orient Memorial Day parade

People started to gather so early at the Orient firehouse Monday morning for the Memorial Day parade that the only others who could be seen on the North Fork were farmers and golfers.

The 7:30 parade, the only annual parade in the small North Fork hamlet, has been taking place so long that no one there could remember when it started.

"It was after the Civil War," said Bob Reeves. "My mother used to ride in it. They marched here and then went to Sag Harbor."

"She was 5 years old for her first parade," he recalled. "That was in 1919."

There were more marchers than parade watchers when the first Orient fire department trucks rolled down the road just before 8 a.m. They would go out in a circle that would stop at five war memorials before coming back to the fire house.

But, while it started small, the parade grew at every stop. Youngsters and older residents, children on scooters and bicycles, formed an ever bigger crowd. "You kind of join in. As it goes on, it gets bigger," explained Colleen McDonough, one of the first marchers.

The first parade stop was at the of grave Burton Potter, the first soldier from Southold Town who was killed in World War I.

An infantryman, he died in France on May 28, 1918. His brother, Irwin Potter, also in the infantry, was badly wounded in the war. Both men were given parades when they got back, Clyde Mellinger said. "The Orient drum corps and clarinet band met him [Irwin Potter] at the Greenport railroad station in June 1919 and marched him home." He said that when the body of Burton Potter was brought back to the hamlet by train in the summer of 1921 "about 60 cars carried the mourners from Greenport to the Orient cemetery."