Prior to the automobile, this horse-drawn hearse was the type of conveyance that carried people to their final resting places. The automobile hearse came into existence during the first decade of the 1900s, but trying to pin down when the first one appeared, or at least when the first American one appeared, is somewhat tricky.
As of 1906, there were not yet any automobile hearses in existence, at least according to this quote from the February 18th issue of the Kansas City Journal.
Eleven months later, in January of 1907, this short story announcing that the automobile hearse had arrived appeared in the Yonkers Statesman.
Unfortunately, this story does not tell us what hearse, or where it had arrived. This is a New York paper, so it could be describing events in that state, or it could have been a reference to an automobile hearse in Berlin, which many papers reported as being the first ever. This story appeared in April of 1907:
The Berlin hearse was an electric automobile, and this illustration of it appeared in the Scranton Truth, also in April of 1907:
Speaking of New York, the following story about an electric hearse created for Leonard Ruoff Jr. of Richmond Hill appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Times in June of 1907, and this marks one of the first, if not the first, appearance of an automobile hearse in the United States. Unfortunately, the accompanying photo is particularly poor.
This blurb appeared in the Freeport Journal in January of 1908, and it indicates that an Italian undertaker in New York had also purchased an automobile hearse during the summer of 1907, around the same time that Ruoff’s hearse was built. It is difficult to read, but it does say that the Italian man is the first undertaker to try an automobile hearse. Again, more detail would have been helpful here.
According to the following story in the Buffalo News, by January of 1909 many undertakers were using automobiles, and “a few” were using automobile hearses. The News was reporting on a 16-foot-long funeral automobile designed by a New York undertaker to carry both the casket and up to twelve mourners. Hilariously, note that it also says that the use of automobiles will cut down on funeral costs.
The funeral of Wilford Pruyn of Chicago was reported as being the “first automobile funeral” when it took place in January of 1909. However, since automobile hearses had been in use since the summer of 1907 in New York, this does not seem likely. Perhaps they meant the first to use a gasoline-powered hearse, which could be a possibility, or maybe they meant it was the first using all automobiles as the hearse carrying Mr. Pruyn was followed by eighteen other cars carrying the mourners.
Of course, it is also possible that they were just wrong. Regardless, this is the hearse that Pruyn made his last trip in:
This photo appeared in a February 1909 issue of the Los Angeles Evening Express about the funeral and that latest innovation in automobile rigs, the hearse. The article said that the hearse, built by Charles A. Coey, was made by replacing the tonneau of a large seven-passenger touring car with the body of a regular horse-drawn hearse. There are always those that resist innovation, so it was also noted that there was a certain class of Americans that would refuse anything but a horse-drawn hearse for their own funerals. The article also states that several of the large eastern auto manufacturers were taking up the “hearse problem,” and that it was expected that hearses would be listed in the next season’s automobile catalogues.
Over the next couple of years, use of the automobile hearse continued to increase as manufacturers designed and produced funeral cars like the 1911 Studebaker version pictured above. This particular car was finished in black satin enamel with silver trim, and hand-carved woodwork on the outside of the body gave the appearance of heavy, plush draperies. The interior was veneered with Birdseye maple, and it was all mounted on a Studebaker 40 chassis, the frame being slightly longer than that of the touring car frame. With offerings like this, the automobile hearse was definitely here to stay, and one paper summed it up this way:
