1920-1930: Handmade Coffins and Home-Grown Flowers

By Grace Cash © 1992

Issue: April, 1992

Editor's Note... The following is one of a series of articles written by Grace Cash. She lives in Flowery Branch, Georgia. Watch for more of her stories in future issues.

Before I was eight years old, I had attended two funerals, and both of these were children near to my own age. One of the boys lived up the road from us, and he died in the typhoid epidemic, in 1922, that also killed his father. My little friend went to Macedonia School where I went, and we would walk home together - brothers, sisters, cousins and neighbor children. I thought he was such a pretty blond, nice mannered boy that my girl-cousins called him my "sweetheart."

The other boy went to school at Chestnut Mountain, near his home, and a community we would move to in 1924. I had seen this boy - who was also pretty and who had brown hair - probably at revival meetings, but one time he came with his father in a rattling Ford truck. The boy came to our porch, there at Papa's Place where I was born, and he said they were collecting money and food-gifts from the garden or the pantry, for the Orphans Home, which was done every Thanksgiving. Not long thereafter he fell from the fodder loft at his home, where he was playing with other boys, and he had a brain concussion. They had a renter, a black man very devoted to the family. He hitched up a horse to a buggy, and he drove ten miles to town as fast as the horse could run, without stopping. He fetched the father, and a doctor, but the boy died within hours after his fall.

At that boy's funeral the coffin was white and he was dressed in white, just as the other boy who died with typhoid. I remember the mother sitting on the front seat, herself dressed completely in white. At that time the undertaker tied the coffin with ribbon bows, and Mama and her children, first in line of the congregation to pass down the aisle, had to wait till they untied the ribbons. I was ahead of my family and I glanced over at the boy's mother and she smiled at me. I thought then - and I think now - she did so, forgetting for a moment her own grief, because I was a child grieving for a child. A young woman sang, "Jesus Is Gathering Buds Today Out Of The Garden Of Love," a beautiful song intended to comfort the family and the congregation.

Both of my little friends were beautiful in death, not much changed from their school days, but in the 1920s, I sometimes attended the funerals of people of the family's acquaintance whose bodies had wasted away by disease and poverty, and death had not been offset by beauty. We had moved from the Gypsy House to The Hill in 1924, but a neighbor from the Macedonia area died, and was buried at Chestnut Mountain. He was a young man, not much more than a skeleton, as the result of both poverty and disease. His black coffin - homemade, octagonal-cornered at each end - was the last homemade coffin I ever saw. (My infant sister Mary Louise was buried in a black homemade coffin in 1923.) At this funeral, the young Man was dressed in a black suit - his Sunday suit the sleeves showing the cuffs of his white shirt.

Before he died, and after the funeral, we spoke of him as a good neighbor, remembering how he had cared for his widowed mother there on their rented farm. When he died he was too beaten down by disease, and the extreme poverty of tenant farmers in our community, to remain the fine looking young man he had been, but he was spoken of in the funeral sermon as having lived a beautiful life. In those days the life one had lived followed that person to the altar. The preacher stood in the pulpit and told, as well as he could, what he knew, of that person's life. Before the funeral hour, the kinfolks and neighbors had also told what they knew that was good, and neighborly, about the one now gone from earthly life.

The young neighbor-man died in the winter time, and I cannot remember seeing any flowers in the pulpit area, nor pot flowers setting on the floor beneath the coffin. But if he had died in the summer time, there would have been flowers from the neighbor's yards, sewed on pasteboard circles, which resulted in beautiful wreaths. There would have been crosses out of pasteboard, and flowers sewed on the form, this being the favorite floral offering of the people, and neighbor women would have brought pot flowers, such as sweet smelling geranium and blossoming moss, and set them in rows beneath the coffin. (No names were attached on cards, dispensing with the need for thank-you notes.)

Then came the time at least one family member got a public job, and money began to make itself known by the desire to "buy" town things. The undertaking business took on a new line of funeral services in the rural area. In times past the women met at the house of a woman who had died, and washed the body, and got the deceased one ready for burial before the undertaker came, and when a man died the neighbor men - or men of the family - made the same preparations for his burial. They laid the deceased on a narrow home-improvised cot which was covered with a white sheet, and covered the departed one with a white sheet except for the head and shoulders which were left uncovered, for those paying their respects before the undertaker took charge. Mama was at a neighbor's house, and when the undertaker came, he started to remove the woman's body from the catafalque to the coffin. Mama told him the family had a black dress for her to be buried in, and that she would have to be dressed as they wished. It was no wonder the undertaker made the mistake - her hand-stitched lace-trimmed camisole and her white embroidered petticoats were prettier than the black dress.

But even before the 1930s the people were getting away from homemade coffins as fast as they could, even if it meant mortgaging the farm or borrowing against the next season's credit. Family members might boast that the funeral of their loved one was much better than that of their neighbors, and they might add that the casket (no longer called "coffin") was the prettiest they had ever seen. "Bought" flowers from the greenhouse was another point for feeling proud of the way they had put a loved one away.

Yet there were those who still gathered at this house, or that, and made cardboard-based wreaths and crosses of home-grown flowers, but makers of homemade coffins could hardly be found in the late 1920s. Even after the undertaker came on the farm scene, the casket was usually black for an elderly person, and often the burial clothing was also black. At that time the casket lid opened from foot to head, showing the feet, which were usually dressed in white or black socks (and stockings for a woman).

In the 1920s we called it "setting up" at a house where there was a death. It wasn't considered polite, not neighborly at all, if a family did not send at least one of its own to stay a while - if not all night - at the home of the deceased. No matter how the deceased might look, regardless of whatever inroads a disease had made, it was the custom to say, "He (or she) sure does look natural." Looking "natural" was considered a compliment, both for the deceased and the undertaker. It was also an effort to comfort those who mourned. One of the finest things I remember about the 1920s is the love and compassion the people had for one another, especially in the dark hours of death.