Remember NC’s Easter Monday holiday? Here’s how it started and why it eventually ended.

Until 1987, North Carolina remained the only state in the union to celebrate Easter Monday, a tradition stubbornly rooted in fancy hats, snappy suits and a day at the ball game — baseball, not hoops.

On Easter weekend, let us recall an era that lasted nearly a century and rivaled the Kentucky Derby for sheer fanciness. Had NC bankers not raised a howl and demand that the state conform to the Good Friday holiday, Tar Heels might be observing it still.

Some old-timers still do.

“Ladies dressed in their finest, men wore suits and ties, and everyone had to have a hat,” wrote Ed Morris in a 2022 issue of Circa. “In the years before there was an ACC basketball tournament, it was without a doubt the social and athletic event of the season.”

Easter Monday observance dates to 1891, when Wake Forest College played its first-ever baseball game against the NC College of Agriculture & Mechanic Arts — now known as N.C. State. Its name aside, the future Wolfpack lost 10-7 in Raleigh.

Wake Forest actually in Wake Forest

In those days, Wake Forest College was only about 25 miles up the road in its namesake town, making for a 19th-century version of the Tobacco Road rivalry.

“The game here always packs more color than milady’s Easter bonnet,” wrote The N&O’s Billy Anderson in 1938.

The game repeated every year on the Monday after Easter, and in 1908, it drew 2,500 fans, or roughly 13% of Raleigh’s population. Two dances followed the game.

Easter Monday baseball became so popular that the Seaboard train added extra cars to Wake Forest, and the Shoofly train reduced its ticket price.

So many fans wanted to see it, especially the N.C. State and Wake Forest graduates dominating the General Assembly, that the Legislature in 1935 declared Easter Monday a state holiday — all banks and schools closed.

A quick review of the headlines from those spring Mondays reveals a slower, pastoral age, when people in North Carolina towns had little else for entertainment outside marbles, lemonade and amateur baseball.

“The significance of it was, like most baseball we had then, it was a social event,” Hank Utley of Concord told The N&O in 2007. “You have to remember, in those days, baseball was all we had in these towns.”

Breathless news accounts from the time describe the players as “a slender short-stopping frosh” and a “southpaw elbower.” In 1948, the Wolfpack “was virtually helpless against the crafty deliveries of Wake Forest moundsmen,” The N&O reported.

Easter Monday endured

But even after Winston-Salem wooed the Baptist college away from Wake Forest in 1956 and the diamond rivalry officially ended, Easter Monday endured across North Carolina.

In 1987, shortly before the holiday’s official end, News & Observer columnist Dennis Rogers described how tiny Jamesville would use Easter Monday as an excuse for a town reunion. Cars on that day showed a colorful geographic variety in their license plates

“Every Easter Monday,” he wrote, “the folks of Jamesville ... gather by the river to catch herring, eat herring, talk about herring and share the sure knowledge that spring has returned to the Roanoke River. ... A slug of good bourbon in a paper cup goes down easy on this raw day.”

But time caught up with North Carolina, and the state could no longer have two holidays putting some off on Friday and some on Monday, depending on where they worked. A relic of simpler times, Easter Monday now spoiled vacation plans and complicated business.

Even The News & Observer called for its end:

“It is long since time for North Carolina to rejoin the Union,” its editors wrote. “Again.”