Author Tom Kashalk wrote about the proliferation of funeral homes serving Slavic Village, in the November 4, 2026 edition of The Neighborhood News (page 4).
For most of the 1800s, there was no funeral home to call. When someone died the family laid the body out in the parlor, the front room of the house kept clean and formal for weddings, courtships and wakes. Neighbors came to pay their respects, someone sat up through the night, and the funeral left from the house. The family called in only a few outsiders: the priest, a cabinetmaker to build the coffin, and a livery man with a horse and wagon to carry it to church and then to the cemetery.
By the 1850s, some Cleveland cabinetmakers had turned the coffin trade into a business of its own. In 1856, Charles L. Bauder advertised in the Cleveland Leader as both a furniture dealer and an undertaker. He kept a coffin wareroom stocked with mahogany, rosewood and black walnut. His ad promised: “Hearse and Carriages always in readiness.”
