Pre-embalming Days in Leslie County, Kentucky: (A Tribute to the Morgan Family)

Pre-embalming Days in Leslie County, Kentucky (A Tribute to the Morgan Family) Marie Parsons In rural southern Indiana, near Corydon and Fredericksburg, approximately thirty miles northwest of Louisville, is a little piece of Leslie County, Kentucky. That little piece is not of land, but of people; to be precise, it is Thadeus Morgan and his relatives. I discovered this transplanted Appalachian treasure over a year ago, really without seeking it. Thadeus's daughter, Jolene (Morgan) Boyer, read about my research on Eastern Kentucky funeral customs in an Associated Press article and contacted me. It turned out that the Morgan family, including her father, Thadeus, and her late aunt, Malva (Morgan) Farmer, had had hands-on experiences with deatli in Leslie County in the two or three decades prior to the establishment of the first funeral home there. Jolene gladly shared with me the information she had about her family's experiences, including a taped interview that she had conducted with her aunt Malva in 1979 and an illustration that her mother, Lucy (Hamilton) Morgan, had drawn for her several years ago of the homemade coffin and the box, made by Thadeus and his brothers. Most importantly, Jolene arranged for me to come to her parents' home in Fredericksburg to interview her father and herself. I spent a delightful Saturday afternoon in November 1992 with Jolene and her parents. While I talked with Jolene and Thadeus, her mother, Lucy, Marie Parsons, a native of Eastern Kentucky, was educated in Kentucky schools, earning a Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. A teacher at Prestonsburg Community College, she with her students has been collecting funeral customs and superstitions and beliefs about death. She welcomes any contributions to the collection. 51 entertained my sister, Lois Esham, who had accompanied me on the trip. AU that Jolene asked in return for her generous sharing of information and assistance was that the Morgan family be given credit for the information it supplied. I gladly acknowledge that all information in this article comes from the Morgans. Eventually, I plan to combine it with information supplied by others in a book-length treatment of the subject . But for now, this is my tribute to the Morgans, formerly of Leslie County and now residents of southern Indiana. They are, indeed, a special family, who have retained many of the traditional values of their Eastern Kentucky home. According to both Thadeus and his sister Malva, at the time of a death in the days before the funeral home, three activities had to occur simultaneously and be completed within a twenty-four hour period: making a coffin, preparing the body for burial, and digging a grave. Most of Thadeus's experience had to do with making a coffin. His older brothers, Roy and Marcus —"Dock" —were the expert carpenters in this process. His own part generally was to dress the lumber, which was always yellow poplar because its soft wood was easy to work with and not as likely to splinter as pine, for instance. Usually his father, Bev P., who had inherited the only sawmill in the area from his (Bev's) father, Hughes, kept yellow poplar lumber in stock. But sometimes when the lumber was not in stock, Thadeus remembers, they would go into the woods, cut the tree, and haul it back to the sawmill for processing ; or they would go out and tear yellow poplar boards off an old building for use in making the coffin. At the time of a person's death, the body would be stretched out as straight as possible, and the length would be measured, from head to toe, with a stick that someone had usually obtained from the nearby woods. Then the body's width would be measured, from arm to arm, with the same stick, and marked by a circle around it. This stick and other materials besides lumber—such as fabrics (cotton, silk, satin, muslin , flock), cotton padding, carpet tacks, etc., which could be purchased at a nearby store, owned and operated by Abert Hoskins—were generally delivered by someone on mule or horseback to the Morgans, and the coffin-making process would begin. Using the stick...