Bri Brasher with Leonard Cash
NLJ Reporter
Funeral homes and mortuaries help families and friends of the deceased cope with loss by arranging funeral and memorial services. The undertaker business provides a necessary service within communities. This week, Leonard Cash told the News Letter Journal the history of mortuaries in Newcastle. The information is based on local newspaper articles. While the title of the paper has changed names over the year, all information is attributed to the News Letter Journal.
A large number of the founders of Newcastle were in their 40’s and 50’s, yet they were still starting a new life. Cash reports that most of the morticians that came to Newcastle were older and went into the mortuary business in their later years as a means of retirement. They hired trained morticians to work for them, and almost every hardware store had a mortuary because they had all the tools to build a casket. Prominent morticians of the area frequently purchased established undertaker businesses from one another.