American Crematory

PETER: All that and more. But first, we’ll spend some time with a physician named Francis LeMoyne In the 1870s, he was looking to fire as a tool to solve one of the biggest problems of his day.

ED: Le Moine wanted to stop the spread of disease. Outbreaks of cholera and dyptheria periodically plagued communities across the country. LeMoyne soon settled on a theory.

CLAY KILGORE: He really latch on to burial practices.

ED: This is Clay Kilgore, a historian in LeMoyne’s hometown of Washington, Pennsylvania.

CLAY KILGORE: What he looked at was, somebody’s dying, and they die, we put them in a rickety pine coffin. Bury them in the ground. It rains, ground water runs through the body through the coffin, it washes down into our wells and our water supplies. We drink that, and then we end up getting sick of the same thing.

PETER: With this theory in mind, LeMoyne turned to a new idea from Europe. Fire was supposedly more sanitary than burial. The new technique was called cremation. But in the US, many Americans were dead set against burning bodies, including many residents of Washington, Pennsylvania. They felt that cremation was pagan, barbaric, and un-Christian.

CLAY KILGORE: There was a newspaper account, I think it was The Washington Reporter. And there was a quote in there from a local man who said, when the body is consumed by heat, the soul is at the same time destroyed. So when Francis LeMoyne built the country’s first crematorium in 1876, the protest turn to a fever pitch.

ED: Clay Kilgore’s Historical Society maintains LeMoyne’s controversial crematory. It’s a museum today. So I asked him, given this atmosphere, how did he get around cremating anybody in the first place?

CLAY KILGORE: Because of what he would consider an irrational fear of fire, he built this crematory, built the furnace so that the way it worked, is that as the body was being broken down, it was purely from heat. It had nothing to do with the flames touching it, it was only heat. So the furnace would get up to about 2000 degrees, and the body would be broken down by that.

ED: How did they test it? Who was the lucky candidate?

CLAY KILGORE: They had two bodies that they put in, and they were two marino sheep that Francis had on his farm. And I’d like to tell people that they did die of natural causes, they were not sacrificed for the testing of the cremation.

ED: Good. And we don’t know their religious preference.

CLAY KILGORE: No, we don’t. I’m guessing that they were Presbyterian, just because most people in Washington were at that time.

ED: [LAUGHTER]

CLAY KILGORE: So that’s how they tested the furnace. And when they moved on to actually what we consider the first cremation in the United States, that was a gentleman by the name of Baron DuPont. He was a Bavarian prince. He was in New York City at the time of his death. And when he died, his caretakers, overseer, was a gentleman by the name of [? Olkot. ?] And Mr. [? Olkot ?] arranged with Francis to have him cremated.

ED: What year is this, Clay?

CLAY KILGORE: 1876. The year that the crematory was finished.

ED: Was the cremation a public affair?

CLAY KILGORE: It was. I mean, so much so that Francis sent out invitations.

ED: Oh my goodness. So who were the people that were actually invited?

CLAY KILGORE: Well, the reporters were invited. There are reporters from throughout the United States, but also London, Paris. But he also invited doctors. Because if doctors study it and see how clean of a process it is, then they can go back to their own communities, and they can try to start spreading this idea.

And the people of the town came out. So you would have been standing there with several thousand people there. The same people that were opposing it only weeks before, and yet now they’re here to see it, because it’s a fascination. Now we finally get to see it. So they drop that opposition, and they come up and say, OK, let’s see what’s going to occur.

ED: OK, so it’s the moment to light the fire, so to speak. What would I see, or feel, or God forbid, smell if I’m standing there?

CLAY KILGORE: Well, you would have been very disappointed. I imagine that people that showed up for this, after the service was over, were standing around going, really, I stood in this– because it was cold that day. It was one of the coldest days of the year, it was snowing. You’re standing in the building. And what you would have seen is a guy throwing coal into a furnace. And you would have had to have stood there for probably about six hours, watching him stoke this fire. And that’s what you would have been watching, just trying to get the fire hot enough.

ED: And then how long is the Baron in there before he’s cooked?

CLAY KILGORE: About two hours, that was about it. Unfortunately, what you had to do was stand there for another four hours and wait for the first to cool down enough that they could go back in and get the ashes. So 14, 15 hours later, you finally get to see ashes come out. And that’s what people wanted to see. They wanted to know what it was going to look like. And it’s so much different than what we think of today of this really fine powder.

But back then, what it was was large chunks of bone. It was a white ash, but there were 7 and 1/2 pounds of it left over.

ED: Wow.

CLAY KILGORE: And the best part for you is that Francis, wanting people to see how clean of a process it was, hands out samples of the ashes to the physicians and doctors and attendants. And so you get to take a small piece of bone from the Baron, and you get to take that home with you.

ED: So I take it that cremation took off. It swept the nation. LeMoyne had a growing business on his hands.

CLAY KILGORE: No, it really didn’t. I mean, the LeMoyne crematory, your first one in the United States, operates up until 1901. From 1876 to 1901, there were only 42 cremations that actually took place there. So it didn’t take off.

ED: How do you explain the fact that almost half of Americans today I prefer cremation to burial?

CLAY KILGORE: I don’t know why they do. But even if you look at it today, there’s still opposition to it. I found it amusing, not too far from Washington there’s a little place, Peter’s Township. And there was a person trying to build a crematoru in Peter’s Township. And all of a sudden, there was renewed interest in the LeMoyne Crematory. Because people were so opposed to it that they start calling the Washington County Historical Society wanting to know, how did people oppose it back in 1876, so we know what to say today?

ED: Clay Kilgore is the executive director of the Washington County Historical Society in Pennsylvania. You can read more about America’s first crematorium on our website, backstoryradio.org. Earlier, we heard from environmental historian Stephen Pine in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He’s the author Fire, Nature and Culture.

PETER: It’s time for us to take a short break, but stay with us. When we get back, we’ll find out if 19th century firemen were really just a bunch of thugs.

BRIAN: You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be right back.