Horse-drawn Hearses Came
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Late, But Once
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, They Thrived
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# Horse-drawn Hearses Came West Late, But Once Established, They Thrived
by Kim Mariette 6/20/2017
To livery owners and undertakers, death meant a good living.
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So wrote Joseph Irving in the September 1858 issue of The New York Coach-maker’s Magazine. Making hearses might have been dismal work, but it would
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business, as would hearse rentals.
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Hearses of any kind were a rare sight west of the Mississippi in the first half of the 19th century. When members of westbound emigrant trains died on the trail, the living usually buried them on the spot in a shallow grave. Even when homesteads and settlements first rose from the Plains, people transported the dead to family plots or local cemeteries by cart or farm wagon. Church, family and friends made the funeral arrangements, including transport of the dead. Undertaking in Western towns did not become its own profession until the 1860s. Eventually, though, manufacturers sent hearses west for use in the frontier communities, and funerals became commercialized, at least for well-to-do citizens.
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In some places undertaking became big business. Nowhere was this more evident than in Butte, Mont., where 18 individual undertakers operated between 1885 and 1905. When a silver-mining camp in the mid-1870s, Butte City (later shortened to Butte) had a population of 1,000, but miners discovered copper on a nearby hill in the early 1880s, and by 1900 Butte was supplying the bulk of the world’s copper production and boasted a population of 30,000. Hearses were in constant demand in the boomtown. In fact, on January 19, 1895, it was reported that “all the hearses in the city” were needed for the funerals of nearly 60 citizens killed in the explosion of a downtown hardware store that had illegally warehoused gunpowder.
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Makers and builders of carriages ultimately turned to the funerary business as a moneymaking proposition. Some had such success with their new line of vehicles that they discontinued carriagemaking altogether to focus exclusively on hearses. Three of the largest and most successful manufacturers were James Cunningham, Son & Co., of Rochester, N.Y.; Crane & Breed Manufacturing Co., of Cincinnati, Ohio; and the Riddle Coach & Hearse Co., of Ravenna, Ohio.
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Riddle Coach & Hearse upgraded its carriage coaches to the highest possible standard and then added hearses to its offerings. The company brought
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international artisans to render the fine carving and trim work. All construction was done by hand.
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7. The hearse is
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the Doña Ana County Sheriff’
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Department’s
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Lawmen.
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Hearses, like other vehicles, would evolve in the 20th century. A 1914 Crane & Breed advertising brochure included the F.F. Woodall poem “Behold Me—The Hearse,” which included the following lines: “In the world I stand aloof from other transportation. None hire me for pleasure; none choose me for a ride; yet ne’er a one objects to take his outing. No passenger of mine hath ever damned the road or praised its smoothness.” By then hearses with electric motors had arrived, though probably not out West. The year 1909 saw the introduction of hearses with internal combustion engines, and a motorized hearse replaced the old WIA Pat Garrett hearse three years later. The frontier was all but gone, and the era of horse-drawn hearses was right behind it.