Funeral Home

The funeral home is a business site where the dead are prepared for cremation or burial. It also serves as a location for friends and family members of the deceased to gather for funerary rites. These funerary rites are planned in conjunction with customers who were either intimately connected with the deceased or are legal executors of the deceased's estate. This entry describes the emergence of funeral homes in the 20th century, and the cultural and structural factors that have caused a shift in the organization and provision of services by funeral homes.

History

Throughout most of the 20th century, the postmortem processing and disposal of the dead was articulated in and through funeral homes. This was not the case prior to the turn of the 20th century, when most funerals revolved around the family home and sometimes the church. Up to that point, the ritualized burial of the dead relied on a host of different individuals in different occupations. Wheelwrights who built and repaired wheels for carriages also transported the dead body from the home, to the church, and to the graveyard. Cabinetmakers constructed coffins. Nurses, midwives, and other ancillary health workers cared for the body by cleaning it, laying it out, and, when necessary, keeping it cool. And members of the clergy oversaw the sacralized portion of the rituals. Cremation of bodies was relatively rare until the 1960s.

Emergence of Modern Funeral Homes

A number of factors contributed to the development of the modern funeral home. Arterial embalming for the purpose of memorialization was introduced to the American public during the Civil War. The display of well-preserved corpses, especially of notable figures like Lincoln, helped popularize the practice, and by the 1880s embalming schools and a major trade association, the National Funeral Directors Association, had emerged. Even then, “embalming surgeons” performed their craft with the aid of portable machines that had a [Page 473]manual pump, and embalming was carried out in the homes of the deceased.

The concentration of populations in cities contributed to the need for specialized facilities into the early part of the 20th century. Urbanization made it increasingly difficult to transport caskets and equipment while negotiating congested thoroughfares, walk-up flats, and smaller city spaces. The introduction of wiring and indoor plumbing made possible the use of electric embalming machines. This development further specialized funeral work and created a need for delimited spaces in which to conduct this work. Furthermore, the medicalization of dying and death expanded beyond the reach of hospitals and into the lives of citizens. This served to rationalize the dying process and consign the dying and the dead to institutions, rather than allowing them to remain in the home. Aligned to some degree with the discipline of medicine, embalming became an increasingly legitimate task and the embalmer was perceived as a skilled technician.

As a result of these developments, funeral “parlors” emerged in the 1880s, and spread across the country over the next 30 years. While funeral homes emerged as specialized sites to conduct the tasks of embalming and demi-surgery (cosmetizing and restoration), it was only in the middle of the 20th century when they became common gathering places for family members to conduct their wakes or visitations and serve as chapels in which to hold funeral services. Funeral home workers began to assume more control over funerary rites in addition to regulating what occurred to a body after death.

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