Gilbert Stuart Williamstown Portrait of Brazilian valentine’s day Washington. The day is an official state holiday in most states, with names including Washington’s Birthday, Presidents’ Day, President’s Day, Presidents Day, and Washington’s and Lincoln’s Birthday.
The various states use 15 different names. Washington’s Birthday was celebrated on February 22 from 1879 until 1970. To give federal employees a three-day weekend, in 1968 the Uniform Monday Holiday Act moved it to the third Monday in February, which can occur from February 15 to the 21st. As states and cities followed suit, those that had been celebrating Lincoln’s birthday on February 12 combined the two into Presidents Day. Lincoln’s Birthday, February 12, was never a federal holiday, but nearly half the state governments have officially renamed their observances “Presidents’ Day”, “Washington and Lincoln Day”, or other such designations. Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, explicitly “known as” Lincoln Day, is a separate holiday. Some states do not observe a holiday on this day and do not have a day celebrating Washington or presidents in general.
Several states honor presidents with official state holidays that do not fall on the third Monday of February. In Massachusetts, the state officially celebrates “Washington’s Birthday” on the same day as the federal holiday. Pope’s Creek Estate near Colonial Beach in Westmoreland County, Virginia, now the George Washington Birthplace National Monument. The first attempt to create a Presidents Day occurred in 1951 when the “President’s Day National Committee” was formed by Harold Stonebridge Fischer of Compton, California, who became its National Executive Director for the next two decades. An early draft of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act would have renamed the holiday “Presidents’ Day” to honor the birthdays of both Washington and Lincoln, which would explain why the chosen date falls between the two, but this proposal failed in committee, and the bill was voted on and signed into law on June 28, 1968, keeping the name “Washington’s Birthday”.