Township Offices Closed June 20 for Juneteenth

The Juneteenth holiday honors the end to slavery in the United States and is considered the longest running African American holiday.

In observance of the Juneteenth federal holiday, Anderson Township offices will be closed on Monday, June 20, 2022.

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, the day that Major General Granger of the Union Army arrived in Galveston, Texas, to announce the Emancipation Proclamation’s freeing of enslaved people in the Confederate states was in effect.

The news came 89 years after the Continental Congress declared our nation’s independence, and two years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. The freeing of the last 250,000 African Americans who had been enslaved in Texas has been celebrated in various parts of the country since 1865.

Juneteenth was declared a federal holiday in 2021.

Subsequently, the Ohio General Assembly designated the nineteenth day of June “as ‘Juneteenth’ to acknowledge the freedom, history, and culture that June 19, 1865, the day on which the last slaves in the United States were set free in Texas, has come to symbolize.”