Historedia
Episode 1 of 1

Creation of Federal Holidays

When
June 28, 1870
Where
District of Columbia
Part of
Grant signs act making first US federal holidays

Congress created national holidays on June 28, 1870, to correspond with state laws, initially applying only to federal employees in Washington, D.C.

The act established Independence Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Year's Day as federal holidays. It was designed to align federal observances with similar laws of states around the District and in every state of the Union. Coverage was extended to all federal employees in 1885.

Sources

  1. Federal holidays in the United States Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-07

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.