What was the former Boyertown burial casket renown for?

Answer 1

During the last three decades of its existence, the Boyertown Burial Casket Company, founded in the picturesque Pennsylvania smalltown in 1893 by a local banker, was known as the second largest producer (after the National Casket Co.) of a full line of caskets both for adults and children distributing its products on a nationwide basis. In that period, Boyertown manufactured approximately 5% of all caskets in the US, being the third largest casket maker in the country. (The largest manufacturer was Batesville, but that company produced metal caskets only at that time). Boyertown had now 23 branch offices with warehouses and selection rooms in all parts of the country. The headquarter of the company was located at North Walnut Street in Boyertown, PA, which at the beginning of the second half of the 20th was called "the casket capital of the United States." The Boyertown Burial Casket Company was the largest employer in town.

From the very start of the company, the aim of the founders had been not just to supply Boyertown and the surrounding area with caskets, but to make better caskets than had been available. Due to the success of the founders, the Boyertown plant had 600 employees by 1910. Boyertown became one of the very few companies in the US which manufactured not only hardwood and cloth covered softwood caskets, but also wide a variety of metal caskets: steel, zinc, copper and bronze caskets welded from wrought metal sheets, as well as several designs of copper-deposited caskets (made by a time consuming electrolytic process): These rare luxury caskets, which weigh about three times as much and cost about ten times as much as a standard sheet copper casket, were manufactured only by very few companies. One of the Boyertown copper deposit caskets (the model # 2471) was double walled, featuring an outer copper deposited 48oz bronze casket and another inner 32oz solid bronze casket. This luxury model had a hermetically sealing triple lid: the outer one was undivided, the middle one consisted of divided panels; the innermost lid was not made of copper deposited bronze like the two others, but consisted of an undivided full length oval plate glass panel. The brass bar handles of the casket were attached in such a way that they did not penetrate the wall of the outer casket. The casket was available with either a statuary bronze finish or with a silver plated exterior. At the very top of their line, Boyertown offered several cast bronze caskets of different designs costing about three times as much as their copper deposited caskets and weighing about twice as much.

In1968, the company started a big expansion program with the aim to become Americas largest casket manufacturer. But the resignation in 1975 of the last company president from the founder's family Mory led to the the downfall of the company, after Boyertown together with National Casket had became the first casket companies publicly traded on the stock exchange in the 1960s. Being run by the Wall Street holding company Tweedy Brown, Inc., Boyertown got a new management which followed a strict "shareholder value" course which resulted in strained relations with the workers, especially with the union members, culminating in a long and bitter strike in 1985. A new production system and a 10 hour shift were introduced with the intention to increase the output from 250 caskets a day to 300, but production fell instead to 200 caskets a day, 60% of them being metal caskets. In 1986 the company was bought by AMEDCO, a subsidiary of the Houston based funeral supply giant Service Corporation International (SCI), which decided to closed the factory in 1988- After the demise of once famous Boyertown Burial Casket Company, only a casket plant of the York Casket Company remained in the city of Boyertown.

The Boyertown Burial Casket Company had built one of the caskets used by the famous Hungarian-American magician and stunt performer Harry Houdini: in 1925 he used an air and water tight Boyertown metal casket for a special demonstration in the art of survival: Houdini remained for an hour and a half in the sealed casket at the bottom of a hotel swimming pool without any visible means of obtaining air. Boyertown provided also the hardwood casket for the burial U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy (brother to the late President John F. Kennedy).