Time was, you could buy a casket from a country store.
By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
A do-it-yourself casket for a pet is as close most get today. I’ve heard of people paying a carpenter to build a casket for a dog, and I get it. Just placing a pet in the ground doesn’t seem loving.
If I were a carpenter and you were a lady, would you hire me to build a casket for your pet? Would you hire a carpenter to make one for your baby? Many years ago folks hired woodworkers to build caskets for family members, but that and other practices changed in a big way. I never think of Abe Lincoln at funerals, but I do now and you will too.
Care for the dead went from a private ritual in the home to a commercialized professional industry thanks to the Civil War. Before 1861, undertakers were typically local furniture makers or carpenters who built coffins as a side line. In A Fistful of Dollars Clint Eastwood tells a local carpenter to “Get three coffins ready.” After dispatching four men instead of three, he tells the carpenter, “My mistake. Four coffins.”
Before the Civil War, Americans buried their dead at once to avoid decomposition. The Civil War created the need to preserve bodies for long journeys back to families, northern mostly. Dr. Thomas Holmes, the “father of modern embalming,” came up with arsenic-based arterial methods to stop decomposition. Holmes’s way didn’t exactly meet with a wave of success, but when John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln, the “Lincoln Effect” would make a difference.
President Abraham Lincoln’s embalmed body traveled on a widely viewed two-week funeral train procession. A “natural-looking” president “asleep” convinced regular folk that embalming offered a way for dignified, open-casket viewing.
A transition of sorts took people from the new post-Civil War practices to the rise of the funerary industry, but it took time. For a good while folks bought caskets from general stores. Can you imagine preparing loved ones for their final resting place and buying a casket from a nearby store?
Well, it happened up in Valle Crucis, North Carolina. In 1923 W.W. Mast advertised that his general store had “quality goods for the living; coffins and caskets for the dead.” Another ad said the store sold everything from cradles to caskets and boasted that “if you can’t find it here, you don’t need it.”
In a bit of an oddity I’ve seen caskets for sale by the side of the road, and I’ve seen a casket in an old general store. Up near Helen, Georgia, I saw a child’s casket in the Old Sautee Store. Not for sale, of course, but a reminder of how things used to be. A brass plate on its hinged cover carried two words: “Our Darling.”
About four years ago I came across three caskets in an abandoned house. They had survived from that period of do-it-yourself funeralizing, relics of how things used to be.
And do you know the difference between a coffin and a casket? A coffin, nicknamed a toe pincher, has six sides. A casket is rectangular. After the Civil War caskets took over, another change.
In the old days people ordered caskets and held funerals for loved ones at their home. They buried family members on their property. That tradition died outside of some who still practice burial without embalming. Often referred to as green burial or natural burial, it’s completely legal in many areas.
The folks who practice green burial? I doubt they think of Old Abe when burying loved ones. I’m not sure just what they think, but I can sure see where they’re coming from. Things change, and depending on your view, not always for the best.