My auction buddy Janet saw it first, the excitement and curiosity in her voice signaling that she had found a treasure. I looked up from viewing the small items on an auction table to see her reading aloud the contents of a framed sheet on a wall.
She was reading a list of services and costs for a funeral. It sounded both macabre and intriguing.
Casket $65
Preservation of remains $10
Hearse $9
Fee to minister $5
Removing remains $7
The bill was for a 1918 funeral, and the undertaker, George G. Norris of Philadelphia, had itemized the costs at $151. It was stamped “Received Payment,” with the signature of G.G. Norris. The bill had been presented to Cyrus Carpenter and dated June 26, 1918. The funeral home had serviced the family from May 23-25, 1918. Neither the deceased’s name nor time of service was on the document.
This invoice for funeral services was the first either of us had seen, which explained Janet’s reaction. It was a curious piece of ephemera, and I found it surprising that someone had kept it and framed it (either the original owner or a subsequent family member). It was well-preserved in the plain black dime-store frame.
Funerals back then were quite different from what they are today. The person may have died at home, the body removed by the funeral home (these first opened in the late 19th century), embalmed (first used widely here during the Civil War) and then returned to the home for a wake or “sitting up,” and services.
During the early 1900s, the casket was normally placed in a carriage with windows on the sides and drawn by horses for the ride to the cemetery. In some instances the casket may have been carried by hand or placed in a hearse.
An account by an undertaker during the 1918 worldwide Spanish flu pandemic noted that he drove his hearse to homes to remove bodies. That epidemic claimed the lives of 20 million to 50 million people.
The process of funerals were similar in African American culture, where black funeral parlors prepared the body. Funeral homes were among the first businesses opened by African Americans in the 1800s because whites would not handle black bodies. Burial societies were organized through churches and other organizations that allowed families to put aside money in a fund for funeral expenses. Services in black families were viewed as homecoming bathed in tradition. Much of the practice is still prevalent.
Around the time the auction bill was written, the average cost for a funeral and burial was about $150, according to the 1921 book “Funeral Management and Costs.” The author Quincy L. Dowd decried the amount that families paid for funerals, both at the behest of funeral directors and from “social pressure.” He also lambasted funeral home directors as unethical.
Dowd, a minister, related story after story of poor families buying caskets they couldn’t afford because they wanted the deceased to go out in style (that’s not too different from what some families still do today). He told of one “poverty-stricken” mother mourning the death of her son. “A funeral bill of $400 was incurred, the mother explaining this extravagance on the ground that ‘it was the last thing we could do for our boy,'” Dowd wrote.
He noted that some blacks at that time spent less on funerals: “Evidence is overwhelming that, except for the Negro population in the South who content themselves usually with a funeral and burial expense of from $16 to $20, the whites, native and alien alike, run to excessive display. Far from begrudging the ordinary high cost of funeral supplies in many cases, poor widows require caskets made to order to suit some individual whim of style in a coffin, causing a large increase in price.”
I suspect that $20 back then for an African American family was considered a lot of money.
The undertaker’s bill at auction seemed to mimic the average of $150, so Norris may not have been the type of undertaker who Dowd and others spoke against. I wasn’t around when the bill sold, but I found it to be a nifty historical document showing one aspect of the country’s early 20th-century culture.
