According to “Sears, Roebuck, USA: The Great American Catalog Store and How It Grew,” a Sears customer wrote the Chicago Mail-order giant and asked if she could return several bottles of patent medicine that she’d purchased the month before.
In her letter, she explained that the medicine had been intended for her husband and after ingesting the first bottle, he’d quickly passed on.
The clerk who received the inquiry responded quickly, with an assurance that certainly, she could return the unopened bottles, and by the way, would she like to see a copy of Sears’ Tombstone Catalog?
Funny story, but the sobering fact is, traditional, elaborate Victorian funerals were expensive. Tradition dictated that certain rituals and procedures be done, and a middle-class family might endure shame and scorn if they couldn’t afford a decent marker for their loved one. And what about the poor? Often, they had to quietly and stoically endure the humiliation of seeing their loved one placed in a pauper’s grave.
After Aunt Addie’s exhumation made the headlines, several people shared “old family legends” about a time when a young child died, and the family – unable to afford a real burial and/or pay burial fees – surreptitiously stole into the city graveyard in the dark of night, and buried their little one in a make-shift coffin.
By contrast, such stories make a pauper’s grave seem like a mercy.
I have no pictures of Sears tombstones, but with all these testimonials, they shouldn’t be too hard to find. Plus, they were made from Vermont Slate, which as a distinctive color and veining.
If you look up Sears Tombstones on the internet, you’ll find there are folks claiming that Sears tombstones were hollow, zinc markers (metal) but this is one of those apocryphal stories. Not sure where it started, but it’s not true.
To learn more about Victorian burial customs, click here.
To read about early 1900s burial rituals, click here.
To learn more about Addie, click here.
The Tombstone Catalog from 1904.
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Does anyone in Plain City, Ohio want to get me a picture of the Frazell tombstone? I would love to see one of these. And there's the Chitty tombstone in Rapid City, SD. That's also a fairly unusual name.
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You'd think freight costs would be prohibitive, but Sears had it all worked out.
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Inscription cost six cents per letter, unless it's a verse, and then its 2-1/2 cents per letter, unless it's on the upper base and then it's 15 cents per two-inch letter.
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Mark Hardin observed that most of these images in the 1904 catalog depict young people. In the late 1800s, one out of five children passed on before they reached adulthood. In early 1900s America, there would have been very few families whose lives hadn't been touched by the death of a child.
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When I was researching the life and death of my Aunt Addie (died in 1901), I came across one story in the 1893 Lake Mills Leader that I will never forget. It was the height of a diphtheria epidemic, and the diphtheria was present in many counties in Wisconsin. In southern Wisconsin, a family had lost seven of their eight children to that single epidemic. The paper reported that the "eighth child had also contracted the diphtheria" and was not doing well. The article said that the children apparently had "weak blood." Today, we'd call it a genetic predisposition .
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The epitaphs mostly depict a young child.
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When my beloved mother died suddenly in 2002, she was cremated and her ashes were scattered. In retrospect, I now more fully understand the comfort that a marker such as this can provide to greiving families.
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For a poor family desperate to have their loved one remembered, the economical "Sears option" may have been a God-send. It provided an option to an unmarked pauper's grave.
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"Verse inscription ideas - at no extra cost to you, our loyal customer."
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I sincerely hope that no one chose this verse.
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This is not a Sears Tombstone, but I find the last line quite interesting. My daughter Crystal found this in an old graveyard near Hartwell, Georgia. Photo is copyright 2010 Crystal Thornton and may not be used or reproduced without written permission.
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To read about Penniman’s poor flu victims that were buried in a forgotten grave, click here.
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Interesting piece! At halloween I went on the midnight tour of the Sleepy Hollow Cemetary in Sleepy Hollow, NY. The guide showed us a number of metal Sears grave markers!
Hi GB,
If you’ll notice in the article, I made the point that those zinc headstones are *not* from Sears. That’s an enduring myth that just won’t die (so to speak).
Here’s the Elliott testimonial tombstone in Petoskey, Mi.
It’s on page 17 of that catalog.
After reading this I had a look around on Archive.org and found that they have the 1906 catalog, looks like tombstone designs changed quickly between issues as several of the examples from the 1904 catalog do not appear in the 1906.
One other thing dropped is depiction of epitaphs on the stones.
https://archive.org/details/SearsRoebuckCo.TombstonesMonuments1906
Hi I would like to know what was about alot of other things in this book . Can you let me know I I can get one thank you
Your Truly , ANNA. P.S
Can you give me your home address please thanks again . What’s going on now and later ?