Preparation of the Deceased

Some of the most basic practices and traditions surrounding death today, such as embalming and wooden and metal caskets were unavailable to the folks in rural Bland County during a good part of the twenty century. Instead, a number of home practices were commonly used during the preparation of the bodies for viewing and burial.

Preserving the body was not widely practiced before the Civil War. But the necessity of shipping battle dead long distances called for a cheap way to preserve the body during transit. Formaldehyde became the elixir of choice. Afterwards, funeral parlors began using the techniques learned during the war to preserve every client that crossed the threshold. But in the South, especially in the mountains, undertakers were as scarce as brass handles on a homemade coffin and the lack of embalming caused some bizarre problems.

There is more than one record of a body suddenly sitting up in the middle of the funeral service. The cause of this unnerving spectacle, of course, was rigor mortis or the stiffening of the muscles after death. Mary Seaver of Johnson City, Tennessee, remembered her grandmother telling her of the stubborn corpse of her great-grandfather suddenly rising in its coffin. The funeral was halted while some of the men in the congregation strained and sweated to get the old gentleman back into a supine position. When they got his back down, his legs rose. When they got his legs down, the rest of him rose. Finally, the lid was nailed down on the coffin and the service pressed on to a hasty conclusion.

Prior to the funeral industry’s rise and its use of embalming, a practice that gained legitimacy during the War Between the States, the interior of a corpse was generally not accessible to prying eyes, hands, or medical equipment.

Instead, the deceased was prepared - laid out - and remained in the home until burial. This was a sacred, almost ritualistic, process. The body was washed as soon as possible after death with soap and water. Then it was dressed in its Sunday suit or dress and laid out for viewing.

While the was body was still in the house, certain precautions were taken to insure the welfare of the living. For instance, the body was always laid out on the first floor of the house, never on the second. If a step squeaked while the body was still under the roof, there would be a death in the family within a year. Likewise, all clocks were stopped immediately after a death. If a clock stopped of its own accord, another death would shortly occur.

While in a few instances the laying out was performed by family members, more typically it was done by neighbors who came to a home for the death watch. An old Scottish belief, still seen today in some of the more remote areas of Tennessee’s Unaka Mountains, holds that watching the corpse for 24 hours after death will prevent the body from being whisked away by agents of the devil.

Sometimes the laying out was performed on a bed. If the person did not die in bed, the corpse was often carried there. However, mattresses made it difficult to keep cold death or stiffening by mountaineers) set in.

The solution to this problem was to place a body on a cooling board (sometimes called a laying out board). This board, covered with a sheet, could be a door taken off hinges, a table, a board used for ironing, or indeed any piece of lumber that was handy, though many mountain families had a specific board for the purpose passed down generation to generation.

If the person died in the winter and the ground was too frozen to dig a grave, the cooling board could simply be placed in a protected place outdoors till spring. Otherwise the cooling board was placed in a parlor on two chairs or sawhorses, and the body stretched out straight. Depending on the person’s position at death (some die while sitting or sleeping curled up) it might have been necessary to break bones or soak parts of the body in warm water to get the corpse flat on the board so it would fit into a coffin.

Neighbors used a rope or sheet to tie the body to the board to keep it straight as well as to prevent it from suddenly jerking upright and scaring the living. Some families employed the Scottish process of saining: the oldest woman in the house lit a candle and waved it over the corpse three times. Then she took three handfuls of salt, placed it in a wooden bowl, and put the bowl on the corpse’s chest. This process was supposed to prevent the body from rising up unexpectedly.

When the corpse was placed on the bed or cooling board, the arms were folded across the chest and the legs brought together and tied near the feet. A rope or handkerchief was tied under the chin and over the head to keep the mouth from opening. Another towel soaked in a strong soda solution took care of discoloration. Some families placed a bowl mixed with salt and ashes underneath the cooling board to absorb disease. Others placed cedar chips or spices around the body to help ward off unpleasant odors.

Some people died with their eyes fully or partially open. If they were left open and rigor mortis set in, they couldn’t be closed. Therefore mountaineers placed weights on the eyes to close them and give the impression that the deceased was sleeping peacefully. Have you heard the phrase "he’d steal money from a dead man’s eyes"? Coins were often used to close eyes, and since they were valuable, there were indeed dishonest community members who would do that very thing. The saying is still heard in the mountains today.