The History of Funeral Hearses
Funeral hearses are essential to Quincy, FL funeral homes. They play a very important role in the funeral process and in the rituals that surround funeral services and burials. But the modern funeral hearses you see today are not how funeral hearses started out.
The first known means of transporting deceased people is the funeral bier. The deceased person was placed on the bier, cleaned up and dressed, and laid out for loved ones to say their farewells before the body was buried. After the family was done, the body would be wrapped in linen and perfumed with spices, and then at least two people would move the bier from the family house to the site of burial.
Biers were constructed of flat wood surfaces that resembled a stretcher. They were either moved manually or with wheels attached to the bottom to transport deceased people from the places where they died to the places where they would be buried.
From biers came the next hearse evolution, which was coffins. Coffins, unlike biers, were completely covered and could be easily transported not just from the deceased’s home to the burial plot, but also in funeral services that honored the deceased’s memory.
Ancient Greece is where the coffin seems to have originated. Greeks relied heavily on ritualized services and customs as part of their culture. Funerals were no different. Many times, part of the funeral ritual, was to carry the dead in coffins through the streets of a city as a way to honor them. Onlookers were expected to be so silent that a pin could be heard dropping.
Until the 17th century, hearses were either biers or coffins. Biers began to be covered with canopies somewhere along the way, and it was this evolution in hearses that led to the creation of the funeral carriage, which was drawn by horses.
The word hearse had been a part of funeral terminology since almost the beginning. But it referred to a candelabra that was placed on the bier or casket as a sign of respect and to identify it as the remains of a deceased person.
After the development of horse-drawn funeral carriages, the word hearse was used to identify them because the coffins, which became the burial containers, instead of the candelabras, were placed on top of the carriage, and it has been used to describe the means of transporting the dead ever since.
However, the evolution of hearse did not stop with the horse-drawn funeral carriages of the 1600’s. By the early 1800’s, as Europe’s wealth increased, carriages had become elaborately-designed vehicles that held the coffin inside as the deceased was transported from the place of death to the place of burial.
Funeral processions had become an integrated part of European funeral rituals. While they were meant to honor and show respect to the death, they were also used to display the wealth of the family of the deceased. The more elaborate and fancy the funeral carriage was, the wealthier the deceased’s family was. These processions were very ornate and stately, overshadowing, for the most part, the actual funeral services and burials.
An offshoot of the funeral carriage emerged after the construction of the railway system through the U.S. Known as a hearse trolley, the railways were built worldwide to transport bodies to where they needed to go. Many railways were constructed from the main line to cemeteries to transport bodies from the end of the railroad to the burial site.
The 20th century saw the first of the motorized hearses that we are familiar with today. As car engineering and technology has advanced, so has the engineering and technology of hearses.
If you want to learn more about the history of hearses at Quincy, FL funeral homes, our compassionate and experienced staff at Lifesong Funerals & Cremations can help. You can come by our funeral home at 20 S. Duval St., Quincy, FL 32351, or you can contact us today at (850) 627-1111.
