08/20/2025
UNDERTAKER ON HORSEBACK: R. Bruce Harris was one of the first undertakers in Logan County, West Virginia. He once wrote that, in 1909, when he started his career, he often traveled to homes around the county on horseback, preparing bodies for burial with various tools and items of his trade, which he kept in his thick leather saddlebags and canvas sacks draped across his mare’s neck.
At that time in the hills, it was common for a relative or friend of the deceased—especially someone skilled with woodworking tools—to build a wooden casket. Meanwhile, the younger family members and neighbors usually dug and prepared the burial plot.
In contrast, historian Richard Rawlinson described how some morticians of that era would measure the body and build their own caskets for families at a reasonable cost. Rawlinson explained, "The undertaker would [then] return to the house to deliver the coffin, sometimes having to remove a window [at the time of burial] as the door was too narrow [to carry the coffin inside and back out from the cabin or house]".
Gail Rubin, a thanatologist, also noted that the advent of embalming, with its first modern use during the Civil War, transformed the funeral industry nationwide.
She wrote, "Dr. Thomas Holmes—one of the founding fathers of [contemporary] embalming—experimented with various fluids while working as a doctor and coroner’s assistant in New York City during the 1840s and 1850s."
Later, R. Bruce Harris (shown here) and his older brother, B.C. Harris, established, owned, and ran Harris Funeral Home in downtown Logan, now known as Honaker Funeral Home on Stratton Street, Logan, WV.
—Excerpts from the book, IMAGES OF AMERICA: Logan County, WV, by F. Keith Davis (Published by Arcadia Publishing)
— Reposted by request
