What was the Crane and Breed casket company of Cincinnati renown for?
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Crane & Breed (C
& B) was the industry's first sheet metal casket producer and
became renown for its many technical innovations, e.g. the
"Everseal" mechanism providing a hermetical (air and water tight)
seal for metal caskets. C & B rightly called itself the "House
of Quality". C & B was also an innovator in designs: in 1965
for example, C & B created a very modernistic stainless steel
casket in a natural brushed metal finish, In the years to follow, C
& B advertised this casket with the slogan that its design was
"often imitated but never duplicated".
The roots of C &
B go back to the middle of the 19th century when Martin Hale Crane
and J. R. Barnes bought the casket part of the Anchor Iron Work in
1853. Along with the business, Crane, Barnes & Co. received the
all-important license to manufacture the Fisk patent burial case,
which was the first metallic coffin to achieve widespread
acceptance and use in the US. As a result, the early history of
Crane & Breed became closely connected to the New York inventor
Dr. Almond Dunbar Fisk who in 1848 designed and patented "An
air-tight coffin of cast or raised metal". It resembled an Egyptian
sarcophagus with sculpted arms and a glass window for viewing the
face of the deceased person. Meanwhile Abel Denison Breed had
joined Crane, Barnes & Co and in 1854, a businessman named John
Mills bought out the interests of J.R. Barnes and the firm was
reorganized as Crane, Breed & Company, which continued to use
the former Davis casket works. 1855 Martin H. Crane designed a new
casket which modified Fisk's original design: the mummy shape was
eliminated and the simplification of the ornamental parts allowed
the casket could to be mass-produced. The fact that President
Abraham Lincoln's original wooden casket later was exchanged for
one of the new patented Crane cast iron coffins was evidence of the
fact that it had supplanted the original Fisk as the finest coffin
in the country. Since the mid 1860s, Martin H. Crane experimented
with rolled sheet iron as a less-expensive alternative to cast
iron, and by the end of the decade he had perfected the industry's
first sheet metal casket. In 1882, Crane, Breed & Co. was
reorganized as the Crane & Breed Manufacturing Company. In
1897, William J. Breed relocated the Crane & Breed works to a
spacious new 4-story brick factory erected at 1227-59 West Eighth
St., Cincinnati, OH (with the main office located at 1231 W Eighth
St) where it remained until the closing of the company some time
after 1973.
In the early 20th
century, C & B also began to manufacture vehicles, especially
ambulances and hearses. In 1928 Howard Breed, the company's new
president, reorganized the firm as the Crane & Breed Casket
Company. From that point of time, C & B concentrated on the
manufacture and distribution of caskets and other mortuary
supplies. During the Second World War, C & B introduced caskets
made out of a composite plastic called Eternalite as a reaction to
the shortage of metal caskets.
When pope John XXIII
died in 1963, C & B barely missed the change to provide his
casket. According to reports in a funeral trade magazine, the
catholic bishops of the US had decided to present the Vatican an
American top of the line casket for the burial of the late pope as
a gift of the American catholics. Upon the initiative of the
archbishop of Cincinnati, Crane and Breed obtained the order to
supply the casket. As the company's top model was out of stock at
that point of time, workers of C & B hand-crafted one in day
and night shifts . Although the casket was finished in time to be
flown to Rome, all the extra work proved to be in vain because
archconservative circles of the Vatican insisted upon burying the
pope in the traditional triple set of caskets which had been used
for pope John's predecessors - an inner casket of cypress wood, a
middle casket of lead and an outer walnut casket. This triple set
of caskets eventually was place into a marble sarcophagus. The C
& B casket intended for pope John was probably the top of the
line product advertised in trae magazines: a double walled casket
of 14ga (extra heavy) wrought bronze. It had a triple providing an
air and water tight double seal. The outer bronze lid was divided
as in a perfection half couch casket. The middle bronze lid was
split, too. The innermost lid consisted of a full length oval plate
glass panel covering the removable inner bronze casket. The weight
of the empty casket was 700 lbs. The casket exterior was finished
in golden natural bronze. The inside was lined with hand tufted
velvet of supreme quality. The casket had cast bronze swing bar
handles in Navy bronze finish.
