Mcguire or Maguire? Who founded Labor Day remains a mystery

TOTOWA, N.J. — For nearly 50 years, Bill Collins, a retired history teacher, spent Labor Day not at a beach or a barbecue, but at a cemetery. He and a dozen or more relatives would gather around the tombstone of his great-grandfather to celebrate his founding of the national workers’ holiday.

Joann Richardson, a retired banker, also celebrates the founding of Labor Day. Richardson shows friends her family photos and yellowed newspaper clippings applauding her great-grandfather for proposing the holiday.

Collins and Richardson, who are not related, are honoring different men with similar names: Matthew Maguire and Peter J. Mcguire.

At least as far back as 1894, when President Grover Cleveland signed a bill into law declaring Labor Day a federal holiday, there has been a debate over which man is the true father of Labor Day.

Maguire, a machinist, and Mcguire, a carpenter, shared a few similarities beyond their last names. Both were respected union leaders with Irish parents, both fought for the betterment of the working class, and both attended the first Labor Day parade in New York City in 1882.

The Department of Labor credits McGuire, who founded the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and was a co-founder of the organization that later became the American Federation of Labor, as the true father of Labor Day.

Since Mcguire’s death in 1906, union officials and politicians have made an annual pilgrimage to Pennsauken, New Jersey, to visit his gravestone and a statue in his honor. Inscribed into both are the words ‘‘Father of Labor Day.’’

But over the years, evidence has emerged suggesting that credit should go to Maguire, the secretary of the Central Labor Union, which organized the first Labor Day parade.

At the center of the debate is a Central Labor Union meeting that took place in May 1882. In an 1897 article in The Carpenter, a monthly union publication,

Mcguire wrote that he first proposed the holiday at that meeting. The parade’s grand marshal, William Mccabe, later recalled, in an 1897 article in The Cleveland Recorder, that Maguire, not Mcguire, proposed the idea at that meeting.

Now, researchers from Myheritage, a genealogy site, say they have uncovered additional evidence that Maguire deserves credit. A key piece of evidence, they say, is an interment card from 1917, held at the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Totowa, New Jersey, where Maguire is buried, that includes a handwritten message: ‘‘This man founded Labor Day.’’ (A spokeswoman for the cemetery said she did not know who wrote those words or when.)