Green Burial: An Idea as Old as the Hills

What we call green burial -- that is, the burial of an unembalmed body that's placed in a basic, biodegradable casket which is then lowered into a vault-free grave, usually in a natural setting -- is seen in our CyberAge as a novel approach to handling the dead.

But, as several people I interview in Grave Matters point out, it's nothing new, bizarre or even remarkable. In the early years of this country, such natural return simply defined the standard American Way of Death. It was the norm, not the exception.

In more rural regions, the practice -- and the embrace of an organic philosophy of life that undergirds it -- endured well into the 20th century.

One of the more powerful, personal narratives about those earlier rural customs comes from the late Rufus Morgan, an Episcopal minister and renowned naturalist from the backwood mountains of North Carolina. In the early 1970s, when Rufus was in his 80s, he sat down with the student writers of the Foxfire books to tell them about the funerals and burials he witnessed as a young man. There's no indication of the exact years he refers to in this passage, though I'd imagine they extend into the 1930s or '40s:

"I really wish that the same burial customs prevailed now as then. . . . . [T]he neighbors would come in during a sickness, and then in death, and they would lay out the corpse and dress him – get him ready for burial. And a neighbor carpenter would make the coffin, and neighbors would dig the grave, and the coffin would be taken to the churchyard or cemetery in a farm wagon drawn by horses or mules. Then the remains would be buried by the minister; sort of a very simple -- and to my way of thinking, more reverent than the present -- practice."

"There wasn't any idea of a metal casket or a means of preserving the remains because, as the scripture says, 'Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.' And I'd much rather think of my body as just going back to the earth where it came from and fertilizing some tree or the grass or flowers, than just having a metal box with me inside preserved like a mummy."

As much as anything I’ve read or written myself, that last sentence of over thirty years ago could serve as a perfect manifesto for the green burial movement of today.

Rufus passed away in 1983, not quite reaching his 100th birthday. Thanks to the ongoing work of the Foxfire project, his views on old-time burials live on in Foxfire 2 (Anchor, 1973) .

As a kid, I was enthralled by the Foxfire project, an effort by a Georgia English teacher and his students to interview old-timers living in the nearby Appalachian Mountains and document their history and passing traditions. (Click here to learn more about its continuing work.)

In fact, I’d read this entry when the book first appeared in the early 1970s. I’d forgotten about it until Lisa Carlson, author of Caring for the Dead (Upper Access, 1997), mentioned it in a recent listserv posting. Thanks to her for the lead.

To learn more about Rufus Morgan, click here.

The photo of Rufus Morgan that heads this blog was taken by John F. Schlatter in 1969. Thanks to John for his permission to reproduce it here.

Green Burial in Pictures

I spilled close to 100,000 words describing various green burials in Grave Matters. Few of them, though, come close to showing off the idea as well as the photos I collected in the course of my research.

Point in fact is the image above. It pictures the woodland grave that awaits the remains of Chris Nichols, the 28-year-old stonemason from South Carolina who, as I recount in the book, passes away after a brief struggle with colon cancer. Chris had asked his family to bury him at Ramsey Creek Preserve, the first natural cemetery in the United States, which lay some half hour from his home.

This single, powerful photograph shows viewers just why Chris asked for such natural return to the elements. No words needed.

A couple of weeks ago, Ilker Yoldas invited me to write a guest post on green burial for her intriguing site, The Thinking Blog.

You’ll find that final post here. As you can see, the images that drive the text really are worth 1,000 – or 100,000 – words.

Green Burial Happened by Default in Historic Cemeteries

Some half dozen natural cemeteries lie scattered across the new green deathscape. But that doesn’t mean you have to travel to these few leafy locales to find good green burial grounds.

Practically any historic cemetery, whose final interments took place in the last decades of the 19th century, will do.

Pine Ridge Cemetery in Hancock, New Hampshire, is a prime example. Nestled behind a low rock wall that skirts the two-lane road that bisects this colonial town, Pine Ridge is the final resting place of local residents from the late 17th to late 18th centuries. Carried off at mostly young ages, some of them children who fell prey to the dysentery epidemic that swept through the area in the early years of the 1800s, the deceased were given natural burials by default.

Embalming, which early Americans considered a desecration of one's scared remains, wasn't practiced until after the Civil War. And burial vaults, which were first used in the mid- to late-1800s to deter grave robbers who supplied early medical school with cadavers for anatomical study, didn't become a standard feature -- and later requirement of cemetery owners -- of cemetery burial until the end of the same century. Metal coffins, which now account for some three-quarters of all coffins sold in this country, were rare.


As a consequence, historic cemeteries like Pine Ridge present real, compelling pictures of green burial. (True, the headstones are less biodegradable than the fieldstones typically erected in the best of our modern, natural cemeteries. Those at Pine Ridge are hewn from granite, and, as these photos from my summer visit to the cemetery indicate, still stand strong.)

As is not the case in more modern cemeteries, the deceased here sleep in green repose. Washed, dressed, laid into simple pine coffins and lowered into vaultless graves, their remains quickly degraded and soon thereafter rejoined the elements. And, in doing so, perpetuated the cycles of nature that supported -- and continue to support -- the living.

The Death of Abraham Lincoln -- and of the Traditional American Funeral

On a raw, wet afternoon back in early April, I marched with a crowd of other umbrella-shielded mourners behind a horse-drawn hearse that carried the casket of Abraham Lincoln down the main drag of Allentown, Pennsylvania, to the solemn beat of a lone drummer.

The casket was a mere (though exact) replica of the cloth-covered walnut case Abe was long buried in, the hearse clearly a prop. But with a troop of re-enactors outfitted in Civil War uniforms and the street fronted with antebellum manses, our modern funeral train caught the spirit of the very real processions that marched through some dozen Northern cities like this one almost exactly 142 years ago to the day, the date of Lincoln's assassination.

Our re-enactment noted the end of one great man's life (and of his era). Unbeknownst to most of my fellow mourners that afternoon, it also marked the anniversary of another kind of death altogether: that of the traditional American funeral.

Up to the time of Lincoln's funeral, deathcare was a primarily family affair. Women of the house typically washed and dressed the body of their deceased, laid it out in the front parlor, often in a wood coffin built by the local carpenter. Mourners came and went. Burial took place on the back forty or community cemetery, and the body was lowered into a simple, vaultless grave a family member may have dug himself.

Chemical embalming, as I explain more fully in Grave Matters, was considered an abuse of the body and thus limited to cadavers used for anatomical study. Resistance to the practice softened during the Civil War, however, because embalming helped preserve the remains of slain Union soldiers for the long rail ride North to their home parlors and family cemeteries.

The connection to Abraham Lincoln? Like many of those Northerners who died under his command, the body of Lincoln was embalmed following his assassination -- the first president to be so -- and loaded onto a funeral train for its long journey to the Springfield cemetery. The train followed a northerly route, taking nearly two weeks and stopping at select cities along the way.


At each one, Lincoln's casket was transported to a central location (via marches like the one in Allentown) and opened to public view. More than a million Americans in total would file past the body of the 16th president. Preserved to enough of a life-like appearance that mourners would reach out and touch it, Lincoln's body put a good face on embalming and, in the process, gave life to a new funerary practice.

Embalming became a mainstay of the American funeral, and, since only an embalmer/undertaker/and eventual funeral director could do it, a true funeral "industry" was born.

Note on the photograph of Lincoln's coffin. The Batesville Casket Company produced the original coffin for Lincoln's funeral the day following his assassination. The image above shows an exact replica, also created by Batesville. In addition to the cloth cover and walnut case, the coffin is lined with satin and silk and adorned with silver handles. In the upper left corner of the image here, at the brim of the soldier's hat, you can see a print of the only existing photograph of the real Lincoln lying in his coffin.