Monroe County closes offices for Memorial Day, holds Keys ceremonies

Monroe County residents will have three stops for Memorial Day remembrance on Monday, May 25, starting in Key West at 9 a.m. at the Key West Cemetery’s USS Maine Memorial and Winslow Plot, then at 10 a.m. at the Veterans Memorial Garden in Bayview Park for a wreath service.

Monroe County Veterans Affairs and the City of Key West will co-host the Bayview Park ceremony at a site the city identifies as a place that commemorates all those who served and sacrificed. The morning observances put the county’s military history in plain view, beginning in the cemetery and continuing at one of Key West’s most familiar civic gathering places.

The remembrance will then continue in Key Largo, where Monroe County Veterans Affairs will co-host a separate ceremony at the Murray Nelson Government Center with VFW Post 10211. That schedule stretches the holiday across both the Lower and Upper Keys, giving families, veterans and longtime residents a local place to gather without having to leave their own end of the island chain.

Monroe County offices will be closed for Memorial Day, but the holiday will not be treated as a routine government shutdown. Veterans Affairs, which has eight employees in its Key Largo and Key West offices, serves about 8,000 full-time and 2,500 seasonal veterans, military personnel, survivors, dependents and family members in the Florida Keys. The size of that community helps explain why the county and local organizers have built a schedule that reaches different parts of the Keys rather than centering the observance in one location.

The same sites have anchored past Memorial Day observances in the Keys, and this year’s schedule follows that familiar pattern. In Key West, the cemetery and Bayview Park will frame the morning. In Key Largo, Murray Nelson Government Center will again serve as the place where the county and VFW Post 10211 pay tribute to the fallen.