Museum of Funeral Customs - Springfield, IL
Posted by: 
Metro2
N 39° 49.206 W 089° 39.256
16S E 272824 N 4411161
This Museum is located just outside the Oak Ridge Cemetery where Abraham Lincoln is entombed. The address is 1440 Monument Avenue, Springfield, IL..but the Museum is reported to have closed in 2009.. even though the building apppears well maintained.
Waymark Code: WMBR73
Location: Illinois, United States
Date Posted: 06/15/2011
Views: 7
From this website (
visit link) we learn:
"The purpose of the Museum of Funeral Customs -- a big room sectioned into display areas -- is to "demystify" the funeral industry, according to Jon. It is a restrained and very quiet place. This may disappoint those accustomed to the Halloween fun house approach to mortality, since the museum has no meat hook exhibits or half-eaten corpses popping out of caskets. There is, however, a great deal of macabre memorabilia, and visitors are encouraged to explore it at their leisure, guided by free exhibit brochures such as Formaldehyde: Its Development and History and The Frenchman Who Influenced American Embalming.
Embalming is in fact the first stop on the self-guided tour, which "gets the least comfortable topic out of the way" according to Jon. One highlight is a recreated 1928 "preparation room," complete with a corpse draining table and a checkerboard-pattern floor (Jon noted that all-black floors are best for puddle visibility). Half-empty bottles of embalming fluid that you really don't want to touch are lined up atop a shipping crate, next to several hospital-white embalming machines that perform the same function as the oil pump at a Jiffy Lube. A "Pioneers of Embalming" wall enshrines people such as Thomas Holmes, who juiced over 4,000 dead Civil War soldiers on the battlefield, and Felix Sullivan, who embalmed Presidents Garfield and Grant but was expelled from the 1893 Missouri Funeral Directors Convention because he was drunk."