Area residents are invited to explore the history of the funeral industry with the Bellville-Jefferson Township Historical Society Museum’s new exhibit featuring Snyder Funeral Home, just in time for the upcoming Bellville Street Fair.
Ruth Shinabarker, curator of the museum, was inspired to do the exhibit after finding two Snyder Funeral Home signs in the museum’s basement.
Shinabarker contacted Todd Snyder of Snyder Funeral Home for additional pieces. Snyder listed the many pieces he could add. “I think I quickly overwhelmed her,” he said. “We have a lot more stuff than we have room.” As a result, the displays will rotate regularly to give the public a chance to view more of the pieces in the Snyder historical collection.
“These are all original pieces of my family’s history,” added Snyder. The Snyder family now boasts four generations of licensed embalmers and funeral directors.
Many of the display pieces are from a time before funeral homes, when services were conducted in the home of the deceased. “Funeral homes grew out of the necessity of bigger locations for funerals,” noted Snyder.
One item on display is a “cooling board” used by Snyder’s own grandfather. The board is a folding, portable rattan piece on which a body could be posed. Underneath, large blocks of ice, or pans of ice, would keep the body cool, while a mesh tent draped above would help hold in the cool air. “Not many cooling boards have survived because the rattan is so brittle,” added Snyder. “This piece dates back to the 1920s and was actually used in this community nearly 100 years ago.”
The backdrop of the exhibit is a crushed velvet curtain, complete with frame, which folds into a traveling case. “The funeral director could basically set up a parlor in any space in the family home,” said Snyder.
Paul Snyder, Todd Snyder’s father, explained the gravity fed embalming instrument on display, “The higher you raised the bottle, the greater was your gravity flow.” He noted that embalming was first instituted during the Civil War, in order to preserve bodies for shipping.
The next step in embalming was an electric embalming machine. The one on display is still in working condition, though it is of course no longer used. Paul Snyder recalled his father using that same machine, “We lived on the second and third floor, with the funeral home on the first floor. My bedroom was on the third floor, and I could hear this thing running in the middle of the night when dad had a call and he was embalming the body.”
Other items in the display range from antique embalming fluid bottles, tools and implements, and even a wicker casket. Wicker caskets, Todd Snyder noted, were used before the invention of body bags to remove a body with dignity from the scene of an accident.
Photos of the family and promotional pieces are also displayed, including a printed fan. “This was a promotional piece my grandfather had printed up and made,” said Todd Snyder of the fan, “Long before air conditioning, he would give these to churches as an expression of goodwill.”
Ladies would use the fans as well as advertise “for that nice young funeral director,” said Todd Snyder. An interesting note is the phone number listed on the fan: 40. Todd Snyder estimates the fan is from a time shortly after 1926.
The museum also boasts a room dedicated to Bellville High School, a military room, a living room display featuring portraits of Bellville residents, a bedroom display complete with a monkey fur coat and a chamber commode chair, and many other interesting artifacts.
The museum is located at 167 Main St. in Bellville and will be open each day during the Bellville Street Fair, Sept. 10 – 13. The museum also hosts an open house on the third Sunday of each month from April through October.
“These are all original pieces of my family’s history,” added Todd Snyder of Snyder Funeral Home.
