On a recent Autumn day, Andrea Rapacz navigates between high shelves laden with furniture, antique clothes and acid-free document boxes on a visit to the corpse preserver. “It’s a showstopper of piece, it’s really fascinating,” said Rapacz, the director of collections at the Connecticut Historical Society.
Rapacz dons blue nitrile gloves before approaching the corpse preserver, not because there’s a biohazard but because the coffin-like object is a rare artifact dating back to the 1870s. She carefully unscrews a brass fixture on the lid. Hinges swivel upward, opening a glass window onto the face of the dearly departed would lay. “It was designed to keep the body cool for a wake or funeral for however many hours or days are part of that memorial process,” said Cynthia Blum, Connecticut Historical Society spokesperson. “You can peel back parts of it and look in through a glass oval over the face.”
The walnut, coffin-shaped box is about twice as deep as a normal coffin or casket. Nested inside there’s a second, water-proof chamber made of galvanized steel. The body would be placed inside the steel chamber. Morticians or family members would pack the surrounding space with ice to chill the corpse. The exterior walls seal tightly, insulated with horsehair.
Rapacz indicated several drainage valves used to collect melted ice. They were as ornate as the brass legs that held the preserver chest-height above the floor. This was an object intended for display, she said. Funeral parlors would either rent corpse preservers out for home wakes or use them on their own premises. As strange as an ornate, wooden, corpse cooler might seem now, back then this device would have been a low-cost alternative to the cutting-edge embalming practices sweeping the nation.
The corpse preserver is a window into a period of major change for burial practices in the United States. Until the late 1800s most funerals in the United States were home affairs. Bodies were washed and prepared by the families or local “layers of the dead.” Coffins were built by hand by the family or local craftsmen. Wakes were short, if they occurred at all. Puritan and protestant funerary customs favored quick burials with little ceremony.
But it wasn’t as if people went un-mourned. Death was a family and community affair. Word would spread by mouth or by horse. Affluent families would send out cards and “funeral gloves” inviting community members to follow the procession. Crowds would follow the dead from the home to the churchyard, town commons or family plot in the yard for interment. Pallbearers carried pitch-lined, candle-covered coffins in shifts to hand-dug grave sites marked with simple, slim headstones.
As time went on funeral practices would get more ostentatious but no less homespun. In Hartford the homes of the deceased and other buildings might be draped with black cloth. Liquor would be provided to pallbearers. British Victorian sensibilities and a rise in Catholic immigration further changed the funeral practices of the U.S. Floral-scented wakes in the home parlor became more common. The Victorians believed the ideal way to die was at home, surrounded by friends and family, at peace with life and God. They called it “the good death.” People collected tokens like locks of hair from the deceased for bejeweled memento mori.
“This idea we have that death is exotic is a luxury of the modern age,” said Joanna Ebenstein founder of Morbid Anatomy, a research library of the history of death, “Life expectancy was around 45 in the Victorian era. People lived with extended families. They butchered their own animals for food… death was just a part of everyday life”.
The wave of death from the Civil War drastically changed American funeral practices. Estimates vary but between 600,000 to over a million people died due to the war between 1861 and 1865. Death on that scale had not occurred before and would not happen again in war. Only the 1918 flu pandemic and COVID-19 come close in terms of death with 675,000 and over 1 million losses respectively.
Embalmers employing new techniques for corpse preservation descended on battlefields to return the bodies of soldiers home. Lincoln himself was embalmed following his assassination, and the weeks long funeral procession was seen by over 800,000 visitors across many US states. “When Lincoln was embalmed, it was kind of the nail in the coffin, if you’ll excuse my pun,” said Ebenstein. “Embalming was now acceptable and in fact desirable.”
After those funerary practices in the U.S. rapidly professionalized into the modern death care industry. The corpse preserver, intended for home wakes of unpreserved corpses is a window into the period where death was moving out of the home, but hadn’t fully left. With the turn of the century, World War I, pandemic flu and the development of refrigeration, the corpse preserver, and the home funeral became relics of the past.
Ebenstein said that the evolution of this industry also sanitized funeral practices and distanced mourners from those they had lost. Death care became the province of experts and technicians, hospitals and funeral homes. The COVID-19 pandemic made this process more intense. People went into hospitals into quarantined ICUs only to reappear for private burials. Pandemic restrictions, then later pandemic caution, reduced people’s ability to be at a funeral in person.
For 200 years, The Hillside Cemetery in Wilton has served as a final resting place of Connecticut’s departed. Leafy, mature maples release clouds of fire-yellow leaves over centuries-old headstones. Some are so worn they are impossible to read.
In the cemetery, the future of the funerals is meeting the past, according to Hillside's executive administrator Pam Brown. Brown said that traditional burials, before embalming, were very similar to green burials. “We’ve presold several plots,” said Brown. “and this week we’ve gotten several other inquiries. It’s really good to be able to accommodate that need.” She gestures out over a meadow nestled against an old stone wall and tree line. Tall grasses, grey and gold in the autumn cold sway gently in the wind. Bird boxes, installed by a local Cub Scout troop, watch over the cemetery. It looks like an undeveloped part of the cemetery, or maybe the start of the nature preserve, but it’s both and neither. This is Hillside Cemetery’s green burial ground.
Green burial is a relatively new movement in Connecticut. It’s a burial practice designed to have minimal environmental impact. About half a dozen cemeteries or green burial grounds exist. Burials are simple and sustainable. Brown explains that here, people can opt to be buried without embalming or a headstone. Bodies, wrapped in natural shrouds or in decomposable caskets, are interred without a concrete vault in the meadow, slightly shallower than a normal burial.
Some green burial grounds offer “tree burials” where a tree or trees are planted over the burial plot. Others offer burials among groves of trees in mature forests. Hillside maintains a semi-wild meadow.
The cemetery staff plant native wildflowers, asters, yarrow, goldenrod and black-eyed Susans, on the plot after burial. Over time, as the body decomposes and settles, more soil is added on top, with more flowers, to keep the grade level.
“The way we are laying people to rest is sequential, you’ll be laid to rest next to the previous person,” said Brown, each plot is mapped on paper and electronic records, but there aren’t traditional headstones. “The sequential burial is really to maintain the integrity of the field and for record-keeping.”
We visit a spot where two people have already been buried. Tiny white wildflowers poke out of the grass. Little patches of clover, not in bloom this time of year, spread out over the soil. It doesn’t look like a gravesite, and that’s part of the point. At the edge of the meadow there’s a contemplative area under a cypress tree. Brown intends to allow small memorials to be placed here for those who are buried in the meadow. She hopes the spot serves as a way for people to come to visit their loved ones, even if they aren’t marked in a traditional way.
“It’s a very pretty view looking up at your loved ones,” Brown said looking at the hillside meadow. “Or you can sit and look at this tree.”
Brown said that she had seen a push for more personal, and personalized funeral options especially after the general isolation caused by the pandemic. Not everyone wants embalming or a headstone. Not everyone wants a wake or church service. Some families and religious practices want to dress and wash the bodies of their loved ones. The funeral industry had to adapt to meet these needs.
“As a steward of this historic, venerated and special place I am excited that that we can offer something that is this long-term sustainable,” said Brown. “Harkening back to our old roots of 200 years ago or earlier, and honoring all burial traditions.”
