“Now the laborer’s task is o’er;
Now the battle days are past;
Now upon the Father’s shore
Lands the voyager at last ...”

Birth ... adolescence ... maturity ... middle age ... old age ... death ... ???

Each stage of life has its rites of passage. None is more mysterious than death and the attendant burial practices conducted by various societies.

Within the last century burial practices here in America have been co-opted by the funeral home and cemetery industries. In Appalachia, however, many of the older residents can still remember when death and burial were matters attended to in a very direct fashion by the family of the deceased. Old-time burials were conducted in this region well into the middle of the 20th century. Perhaps a few still take place in the secluded hollows of the Smokies region.

A good account of old-time mountain burials is contained in “Foxfire 2,” the student production initiated down in Rabun County, Ga., in the early 1970s.

By interviewing older folks in the community, the students learned that “as soon as a person died, a number of things were traditionally done almost simultaneously: a bell was tolled announcing the death; a neighbor was contracted to produce a casket (unless it had been made in advance under the supervision of the person who had died); relatives who lived in the community were notified as quickly as possible ... sometimes by means of a letter edged with a black border; and the body was laid out in preparation for the wake that would take place that night in the home of the deceased. The ‘settin’ up’ was held in the home since, as Maude Shope said, “they didn’t have no funeral homes take’em to, y’know. If one was t’die here last night, we laid’im out. What neighbors was already here ’cause somebody’uz sick would strip th’bed off and put’im on a plain plank till y’got yer casket.”

Generally the number of times the bell was tolled depended upon the age of the deceased. Neighbors could often identify the deceased by the number of tolls. The bell was always tolled slowly ... very slowly.

The students were told by Aunt Arie, their most famous informant, just how a body was laid out.
“Aunt Arie said that it was essential to work fast or the body would stiffen up and swell. She talked about hearing arms break ‘in there’ after the body had stiffened. They would massage the person’s cheeks to get the eyes closed, and then put a silver coin over each eye to keep them shut since, “lots a’times with homemade fixin’ and the ‘jostlin,’ they’d come open.’ Silver was preferred because copper might turn the skin green. In one of the most touching moments that took place in our interviews, she revealed that when she washed her husband, Ulysses, before his ‘buryin’, she found a birthmark that she had never known was there.”

Dressing the body properly was an essential element of the burial process. Shirts were sometimes split down the back to get them on. Some deceased gave directions prior to their deaths as to how they should be dressed. One woman interviewed recalled that her mother had insisted upon being dressed out in one of her homemade dresses. Women were often buried in black or white ... men in a suit. Children were often buried in white clothing, sometimes in a shroud of different colors.

The students were told by their older relatives that “just as there were no funeral parlors, there were also no professional casket makers. That work, like the preparation of the body, was done by friends, relatives, or men in the community who did it either for free, or to earn a portion of their living ... (but) many more simply did it as their contribution to the mourning family.”

Caskets were made of various woods: poplar, pine, oak, cherry, walnut, and chestnut perhaps being the favorites. Sometimes they were fitted to the body of the deceased ... sometimes they were simply wide at the shoulders and narrow at the feet ... and sometimes they were just square boxes. Some were lined with cloth. A favorite cloth that was “satiny lookin’” was known as “white canebreak.”

In his wonderfully instructive book entitled Hazel Creek From Then Till Now, Hazelwood resident Duane Oliver describes the burial of Moses Proctor in 1864.

“Since all the men were away, the women and children of the family and the Bradshaw neighbors had to do everything. Moses, seventy years old and ill, had known he was going to die and told his wife to bury him in the front yard where their cabin had stood, the place that is now the Proctor cemetery.
Since there was no lumber he did not want his womenfolk to try to hew boards, and told them just to wrap him in a blanket, probably a coverlet that Patience had woven on the loom that he had made her, and bury him that way. The women and children dug his grave in the hard, rocky clay hillside, brought him to the new graveyard in a sled and buried him. The grave, as all did, faced east so that he would be facing the Resurrection. For a tombstone, the women placed a thin slab of fieldstone ...”

Maggie Valley resident Hattie Caldwell Davis also describes burial practices in Cataloochee Valley: Vanished Settlements of the Great Smoky Mountains.

“When a body was dressed and placed in the coffin ready for viewing, it was left in the home, and neighbors all came and brought food and made coffee. They sat up all night with the corpse, and the family gathered around, talking and remembering all the good things and good deeds the person had done. Sometimes they sang religious songs.

“The next day the funeral service would be held at the gravesite or in the home. After the service the casket would be loaded on a sled and hauled to the cemetery for burial.

“Then the graves were looked after, kept clean, and flowers placed on the graves. When flowers were not in bloom they made flowers from crepe paper to decorate the graves and to decorate the homes.

“Elizabeth Howell Caldwell, wife of Hiram, was always known as Aunt Lizzie. She was a very religious person. She was eighty years old when we had to move out of Cataloochee (because of the founding of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934) and she was very much saddened, having to sacrifice her life long work, her home and all. She had her headstones put in the cemetery there in Cataloochee between Hiram and her child, Connie, who had died young. She knew she would be coming back there to be buried. She died in 1937 only three years after we moved to Maggie Valley.... A short time after we moved, Aunt Lizzie got a Mr. Roten at Dellwood to make her a coffin of walnut wood. It was hauled to Maggie Valley on a wagon. She lined it with white cloth, satin or taffeta, then it was stored until it was needed.

“She made her burial clothes of white cloth. No one had ever seen her wear white before. She always wore navy or black. Her hair was still black, only a few gray hairs under the ball of hair she wore on the back of her head. When she died, her body was taken back to Cataloochee for burial as she had planned and buried in the family cemetery, upon the hill back of the barn.”

(George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 287713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com

 

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