For more than a decade, I have been struck by the variety of paperweights and similar items issued by the funeral homes of America that depicted the kind of vehicles used by those practitioners. My particular fascination has been for those early horseless carriages that undertakers employed to do double duty — using them both as ambulances and hearses, a practice later outlawed by federal law. Four prior posts [see Note] have featured 36 such artifacts but new examples continue to appear. The result is a fifth post on an old subject.
Dual-purpose transport preceded the motorized era. Shown here is an ashtray bearing the photo of a horse-drawn hearse for the McCreary-Horner Undertaking Company. But looked at closely one sees a red cross in a rear window — the universal symbol of an ambulance. Because the company provided a telephone number but no address, it has been impossible to find out further information on this funeral service.
The paperweight that follows is a variant on one featured in an earlier post. The earlier version seemingly was coy about the core business of Ziegenhein Bros. of St. Louis, Missouri. It showed a vehicle that has many attributes of a hearse but gave its purpose as “L. and U.” -- to be understood as livery and undertaker. The second version makes clear that the Ziegenheins also were running an “auto ambulance service,” adding that it was available day and night. The Ziegenhein family has continued to run a funeral business in St. Louis.
Celluloid pocket mirrors, as the one shown here, allowed a wider range of colors and sharper images than paperweights. It was issued by Tetley, Sletten & Dahl of La Cross, Wisconsin. This company was begun about 1905 by Theodore K. Dahl who later took on partners Tetley and Sletten. Upon their departure Dahl became the sole owner and operated it until his death in 1935. Thereafter it was managed by his daughter, Esther, one of few women funeral directors, until her death in 1959.
Carroll & Mast featured a light colored vehicle that might be taken for a single purpose ambulance. The label on the paperweight terms it a “motor ambulance.” Look closely, however, at the rear window of the vehicle. It displays a stained glass motif very common on the hearses of the day. If one of these showed up in the neighborhood onlookers could never be sure if it was headed to the hospital or the burying grounds.
With $200 in cash and a blueprint D.H. Cummings of Richmond, Indiana, in 1917 launched the Lorraine Car Company, also known as the Motor Hearse Corp. of America. The blueprint was of a hearse, and the funeral car trade was the focus of Cummings' new business. By 1919 the company offered a large line of both conservative 12-column carved-panel hearses, as the one shown here, and more modern limousine-style coaches. The owner was forced by an economic turndown in 1921 to sell to another Richmond manufacturer who three years later also folded.
At the beginning of the 20th Century many black Memphians began establishing their own businesses. First among them, the oldest African American business in Memphis, was T. H. Hayes and Sons Funeral Home. It was founded and operated by Thomas Henry Hayes, working with his wife, and their two sons. Hayes’ range of services were affordable, it is said, to the working classes as well as to elites. Hayes featured both horse drawn and motor hearses, like the one shown here on a weight.
Sitting in the driveway of the Wilson Funeral Directors of Amsterdam, New York, is yet another vehicle that might have been used as an ambulance. Edwin L. Wilson, designating himself a “funeral director and embalmer,” in 1925 advertised that he offered automobile equipment.” A suggestion that Wilson also provided ambulance services was his promise of a “lady attendant.” She might be appreciated by someone on the way to a hospital; less so on the way to the cemetery.
The Stormer Funeral Home was founded in 1904 by Aaron M. Stormer in Quincy, Illinois. He later brought his son, Coley, into the business. By glancing to the lower left of the company’s advertising paperweight, a motor vehicle is visible that likely is one of the Stormer fleet of vehicles.
The hearse/ambulance motor hybrid lasted some 70 years. Until as late as 1979 hearses could be combination coaches. Stricter Federal standards were decreed for ambulances. The hybrids were unable to meet those requirements and manufacturing was discontinued. In many smaller communities even today, however, ambulance services continue to be the business of the local undertaker. The distinction between their vehicles is no longer at issue.
Note: Prior posts on ambulance/hearses and paperweights have appeared on this blog as Where to Buddy? Hospital or Graveyard?, July 17, 2009; Chasing the Ambulance: But Wait….Is it a Hearse?, May 24, 2013; Funeral Home Ambulances: A Conflict of Interest? November 5, 2016; and Wrapping Up Hearse Ambulances, September 1, 2018.
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