What was the Crane and Breed casket company of Cincinnati renown for?

Answer 1

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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.