Funeral Home Fans And Funeral Memorial Cards--Two Appalachian Traditions

 I recently posted a small post in Facebook about funeral home memorial cards which was my rapid response to a clue on "Jeopardy" the day before about the poem "Crossing The Bar" by Alfred Lord Tennyson which has been used on the back of funeral home memorial cards in Appalachia for many years.  That post was very actively and positively received by numerous people in Facebook groups devoted to Appalachia.  It had never occurred to me to write a post about these two topics despite the fact that I have been saving/collecting both items for quite a few years.  I have probably a couple hundred funeral memorial cards, all from funerals or visitations I have attended over the years.  I have also recently acquired a small collection of funeral home fans both from funeral homes where I have attended services and from a few small yard sales I have attended.  Both these items, especially the fans, are less often seen than in the past.  Funeral memorial cards were present at nearly every funeral I ever attended until about ten or twenty years ago.  Funeral home fans became less common when the small rural churches across Appalachia nearly all acquired air conditioning.  Nearly all Appalachian funeral homes for many years used the fans as advertising and always left a stack in every church where they held a funeral.  Many of the older Old Regular Baptist, United Baptist, Freewill Baptist, Holiness, and Pentecostal churches across the region still have some number of the fans which are frequently still used even if electricity and air conditioning are present.  But most funeral homes have stopped using them as a form of advertising.  Historically, the fans nearly always had a front side which was some generic religious themed reprodution of a religious painting or photograph in color, sometimes a photo of the funeral home building, but more often a painting of one of the more popular depictions of  Jesus Christ, either on the cross, the Last Supper, as the Good Shepherd, or arising from the tomb.  The reverse side was almost always plain white with the name, address, and telephone number of the funeral home involved.  The fans were usually a thin piece of somewhat stiff paper about 8" x 8" with a flat wooden handle stapled to the fan which was about 1" x 8".  It was also possible to see the same fans from the same printers being used by both local businesses and political candidates but they are less common.  I do have a few political fans in my collection.  

This first fan is from the funeral home with which I grew up as a child, The Hall Funeral Home of Martin, Kentucky, and shows Jesus Christ as The Good Shepherd on the front which is one of the most common scenes to be shown on funeral home fans.  

This next fan is from a funeral home, the Thornburg Funeral Home, and a community, Farmland, Indiana, in which I have never been.  I located the fan at a small yard sale in Stanton, Kentucky, where I also bought several other funeral home fans and a couple of antique books and a corn sheller.  It shows a typical Last Supper scene with a typical advertisement for the funeral home on the back. 

 

The funeral memorial card below is from the funeral of a neighbor, Flora Cook Isaac, and has a photo of the deceased on the front which is a common choice for funeral memorial cards.  

The interior of Flora Cook Isaac's memorial card is a typical two-sided print statement of birth and death dates, survivors, clergy, burial site, etc. and the left side of the print is the 23rd Psalm which is also a very common inclusion either on the inside left of the rear of these memorial cards. 

This next memorial card is from the funeral of my good friend and former auction ring man, Dewey Rogers.  The front is a depiction of the pick and shovel of a coal miner, which he had been in his younger days.

 

 

 

I will be adding several more photos to this blog post over the next few days due to a current problem with converting scans and photographs on the equipment I am using.  If you like what you have seen so far, please return in a couple of days and I will added to the contents of the photograph section. 

Recreation And Linguistic Change In Appalachia

As I was taking my daily walk of an hour today in Old Mill Park in West Liberty, KY, I saw a large gathering of either a family or church group in the largest shelter in the park.  A group of several of the people were playing the game of Cornhole under the shelter roof on the concrete floor with what I sincerely hope was a fully regulation set of game apparatus.  They seemed to be having a great time.  I have to admit that I never see a game of Cornhole being played without instantly marveling once again at just how rapidly and strangely language changes in the world in general and the USA in particular.  Upon researching the term Cornhole, I learned that the American Cornhole Association and/or the American Cornhole Organization regulate the game.  One is located in Milford, OH, and I could not find a physical address for the other although I must admit that I have no need for it anyway.  I was also amazed that there are actually strict regulations about what constitutes an official game set up and equipment. There are also strict standards for what is or is not a sanctioned tournament. God help you if you and your friends and family ever participate in an unsanctioned game or tournament with equipment that does not meet the official standards.  Naturally, I wondered who in their right mind would care how near or far they are required to toss a cloth bag full or corn at a hole in a wooden elevated ramp, or how much corn goes in one of those bags, or how large the hole in the wooden ramp might be, or just how large that wooden ramp might be in all its dimensions, or how many bored individuals participate in the game, or whether or not the participants are all within a particular age range or gender, or any other mundane aspect of the game that might suddenly fall outside the official regulations.  I even found more than one lengthy discussion of various competing theories for when the game of cornhole was invented and whether it is a modern American invention or an historical Native American challenge of their athletic abilities.  

Photo of Cornhole Game by Amazon.com

But the reason I always marvel at the recent change in linguistics lies in my memories of how, when, and where I first heard the term "cornhole" and was told as I was given the definition that I must not ever allow a responsible adult to hear me say the word "cornhole".  My Google search of the term also revealed numerous hits of a linguistic nature on the term which I knew in advance it would do.  When I was young and for untold decades before, the official definition of the term "cornhole", as explained by the scholarly Online Slang Dictionary,  was "to be the penetrator during anal intercourse". How on God's green earth did a term with a decades old definition like that which would have to be abhorred, hated, vilified, and feared by God-fearing church members suddenly become a harmless, but somewhat meaningless, game to be played by those same God-fearing church members and their little, innocent descendants?  I am sorry to say that I could not locate a royalty free and socially acceptable photo of the other, more historical definition to include on this post.  

I also always remember, when I see a game of cornhole, an incident at a Northern KY storage auction which I was participating in as a buyer.  The lock was cut off a unit and the most visible item in the unit was a cornhole game.  I have no idea if it met regulation standards.  But, as soon as the door slid up, the auctioneer who was actually conducting the sale and I just could not resist starting a minute or two of word play and patter about the linguistic change in the term which the crowd actually loved except for one or two potential customers who appeared likely to be among those God-fearing church members who wished to buy the unit, take the game home, donate it to the their church, and schedule  a regulation tournament for even the youngest of their soon to be God-fearing descendants. 

Memorial Meeting On The Grounds Of The Elijah Smith Cemetery

Random Appalachian Cemetery Photo

On Sunday, September 24, 2017, my wife Candice & I attended a traditional Appalachian Memorial Meeting on the grounds of the Elijah Smith Cemetery in Dingus, KY, in Morgan County.  The service was conducted by Rev. Lonnie B. Wright and other ministers and members of the Enterprise Association Of Regular Baptists.  There were about forty people in attendance with most of the crowd tending toward the elderly side.  Several members of the congregation commented that the crowd was smaller than it had been in past years.  We attended the service primarily because Candice is friends with Shirley Robbins who also cleans our house and several members of her extended family are buried on the cemetery including her parents, Clint Howard and Ella Wright Howard .  We had known both of them and used to visit them before their recent deaths.  We also encountered a few other people we knew at the service including one of Candice's providers at ARH Physical Therapy in West Liberty.  I did not take any photographs of the service or the crowd since I was uncertain if anyone would object to being photographed.  

The cemetery is located on KY 437 off KY 172 between West Liberty, KY, and Crockett, KY.  The cemetery is located on a hillside but has a relatively good gravel road to the hill behind the cemetery.  The graveyard is fenced with chain link fence and has several benches made from 2" x 12" plank on cinder blocks.  There is even a lectern for the ministers although few of the Regular Baptist ministers ever stay stationary behind a lectern, podium, or altar.  The service began with several songs and eventually three ministers including Lonnie B. Wright preached in the typical rambling, unstructured fashion of the Regular Baptists.  Most of those ministers would say this style of preaching is about "letting the Lord lead you" or "doing what the Lord tells me to do".  The hymns are older, traditional, and not usually found in a Broadman Hymnal.  Most of the various associations of Old Regular Baptist Churches use some form of locally printed hymnal without music notation.  Here is a link to the one hymnal I can find online that claims to be designed for the Old Regular Baptists.  I do not personally own an Old Regular Baptist Hymnal and probably should find one for times like this.  

The service lasted about two hours and the crowd gradually wandered off after checking a few graves of people they knew.  Several of the graves had new flowers and other decorations which is usually more common around Memorial Day in late May.  It was interesting to see a memorial meeting on a cemetery which I had not attended in several years.  Many, if not most of them, have gradually died out.  Someone in the crowd mentioned that they "need to build a shed up here" which used to be common on Appalachian Cemeteries.  I grew up near one in Knott County Kentucky, the Turner Cemetery, which for many years had a building with a large roofed area of seating, stand, and podium which would have seated more than a hundred people.  But a forest fire got out near the cemetery and jumped to the stand and burned it.  It has never been replaced.  These meetings arose from the circuit rider tradition shortly after settlers arrived in the mountains.  People often died in those days and were buried without a minister being present.  Then, on his next pass through that area, the minister would hold a service on the cemetery for the recently deceased.  It is interesting to see the tradition being practiced in any context in today's world where so much of our Appalachian Culture, Traditions, and History are gradually disappearing.