On March 1, 1898, a furniture and undertaking business opened on Main Street in Chardon.
It was not uncommon at the time for undertaking to be connected to a furniture store. Furniture makers would often sell their furniture and, being skilled in that trade, they would also build and sell coffins.
While the family has been out of the furniture business for nearly 70 years, the Burr family continues to provide funeral services for families after more than 120 years.
Burr Funeral Home and Cremation Services at 116 South St. has the distinction of being one of Chardon’s oldest family-owned businesses.
“This truly is one of the few businesses where everybody else’s family comes first,” said Marc Hal Burr, a fifth-generation undertaker of the Burr family.
“Our rule here is, if a family asks if it would be possible to do something — they’re not asking my impression, they’re not even asking for permission — they are wanting to do it, so our job is always to say sure,” he explained. “If they ask us for something out of the ordinary, it’s because that’s what they want and we have to make it happen.”
Pictures of grandchildren or a stuffed animal from a grandchild are common items families request to place in a loved one’s casket.
“Every family has a little something,” Marc said. “I guess the number one bottled thing is Jack Daniel’s. I don’t know why, but some people want it because their dad always liked it. We’ve put in cans of beer and decks of cards.”
One time, Marc said his wife, Nan, had to put a flashlight — turned on — in a casket because the decedent was afraid of the dark.
Even in his own family, Marc said his father was draped in his casket with a University of Michigan blanket and his mother in a The Ohio State University blanket. And instead of organ music, his mother asked the Ohio State fight song be played at the dismissal of her service.
“The best I can do is take a bad situation for a family — the death of a loved one — and make it tolerable,” he said. “I can’t make it good. Nobody’s ever going to say let’s do this again next week. The best I can do is take a bad situation for a family, something that they really don’t want to do, and make it so when it’s all over, you get that psychic income — a hug and a thanks from a family for doing the right thing.”
‘Four Ghosts’
Burial of the dead has changed since Marc’s great-grandfather Henry Milton Burr — whose father, John Burr, was a cobbler and undertaker in Montville Township — moved his family from Wadsworth to Chardon and established the family’s furniture and undertaking business with John Thrasher 120 years ago. Undertakers prepared the body in the home and funerals were held from the home or in church.
“I still have the stuff to do embalming,” said Marc.
He recalled seeing a portable cane table in the front window of the home of a Chardon woman who collected antiques.
“It was really neat. The head rose and it had legs that folded out,” Marc said of the table, adding the woman thought it was a beach chair of some sort, with holes in each corner for an umbrella.
“I told her it was a cooling board that we used to take into a home and we would put the person on it, and the holes were where you would put the poles holding the embalming fluid that would drain into the body by gravity,” he said. “The head would be elevated and you would come back the next day, dress them and put them in the casket.”
Marc never saw that cane table in the woman’s window again.
When Thrasher retired, Marc said his great-grandfather and Walter Wood bought the furniture and undertaking business of Henry Bickle in 1909 and moved into his store in Memorial Block on the north end of Chardon Square.
“Great-grandpa always barbered. Any time he was in the funeral business, he had partners,” Marc said, recalling Henry and Bickle had started the Chardon Mausoleum Company together.
Around 1912, Fleet W. Smith — the first graduate of Chardon High School to enter the field of embalming — joined the firm after Wood moved to Atwater Township. The firm changed its name to Burr and Smith, and continued in the same location until 1926, when it moved into a new brick building of its own on the south side of Water Street — in what is now the Wantz Building — on Nov. 1, 1927. Around that same time, Hal Sterling Burr — Marc’s grandfather — took his father’s place in the firm.
At the new Burr and Smith furniture and undertaking store, a small room was used for small funerals and Smith’s home at the intersection of Tilden Avenue and Water Street was used for larger funerals.
When ill health forced Smith to reduce his role, Hal’s home on South Street became used exclusively for funerals and has ever since.
“We just had a home, it wasn’t a furniture store, it wasn’t trying to be everything,” Marc said. “It was just a home that was designed to have funerals.”
Smith died in December 1947, just after selling out his interests to Hal, whose son, Hal Marcus Burr, a World War II veteran and Marc’s father, joined the firm.
Looking back over the years, Marc, who joined the firm in the fall of 1974, understands change is constant.
“I have what I call four ghosts. I’ve got my dad, grandpa, great-grandpa and great-great-grandpa. I’ve got these guys who were all in the business,” he explained.
At different times, each generation has had decisions to make, like the time his great-grandfather decided to replace the horse-drawn wooden wagon with a new motor-driven hearse.
“They made a decision and apparently whatever that decision was it was the correct one, because it allowed the next one to do what they do and then the next one and the next one,” Marc said. “So, even today when I’m thinking about something, should we do this or that, I think about these four guys, what was going through their mind.”
Growing Up in Chardon
Marc said it is difficult at times to be the town’s funeral director. Burr Funeral Home has handled countless arrangements over the years, including for victims of the Chardon Schools shooting and more recently the two CHS graduates who died last summer in a motor vehicle accident on state Route 44.
“I’ve learned to wear sunglasses,” said Marc, referring to a trick of the trade he learned from his father. “Because then nobody can see if you’re tearing up.”
Another thing he learned from his father is, it is one thing to bury the parents of friends, but it is an entirely different thing to bury your friends.
“And in a small town like Chardon, your friends aren’t necessarily your own age,” Marc said.
As Marc, 67, and Nan think about the future, they hope Burr Funeral Home will remain in Chardon for generations to come.
“That’s certainly what I hope for,” Marc said.
