Kayser's offers funeral services history display

Lincoln casket replica in town for Memorial Day

MOSES LAKE — Come Memorial Day, Basin residents will have the opportunity to pay their respects to a dearly departed president — 141 years after his death.

An exact replica of President Abraham Lincoln's casket will be among the items on display at Kayser's Chapel and Crematory May 27 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., for an open house in conjunction with Spring Festival weekend.

Other items on display will include a 1900-era Sayers & Scovill horse-drawn hearse, cooling boards and home embalming kits, a glass-topped embalming table with an attached gravity flow bottle and three Civil War-era cast iron coffins.

Antique automobiles on display include a Senior Grand National show-winning 1939 S&S Cadillac "carved side" hearse believed to be the only one of its kind left in existence and an original unrestored 1939 Henney Packard hearse still used by the funeral home for special requests.

Kayser's owner Jerry Kayser noted the hearse gets used "almost sometimes more" than

some of the other hearses.

With a grin, he said he doesn't have any other hobbies.

"I don't hunt, fish or golf, I don't do any of those things, but I enjoy collecting old cars, and hearses in particular, and I've got a huge collection of some amazing funeral equipment and memorablia-type things," he said. "There are only a handful of us around the country that are eccentric enough to collect these kinds of things."

Manager Craig Morrison said Kayser's collection has several museum-quality offerings.

Morrison noted Lincoln's casket is being borrowed from the Batesville Casket Company of Indiana, which made the replica based on pictures taken in 1865. Morrison called it "the perfect replica of how they put that together," and said the story behind it is inspiring.

"Just the difference between the caskets made 150 years and how they're made today, and what type of caskets were available to the general public, and how they made this casket for an assassinated president of the United States," he explained. "It's remarkable to me."

The casket serves as the basis to bring in school-aged residents and provide an education about Lincoln, Morrison said.

"Because of our profession, because of the funeral-related things that we have, we just thought it was a great idea to get out into the public, to offer them something they could see no where else and educate them a little bit," he said.

Kayser's is anticipating hundreds of visitors to come see the display. A previous display six years ago was expected to draw 100 people, and ended up bringing in about 700.

"We had people coming in here not really knowing what to expect," Kayser recalled. "The way we had Lincoln's casket displayed with the Civil War-era music, it ended up being a very emotional experience for a lot of them."

That was not by design, Kayser said, but because of the emotional impact of what the display represented in the nation's history.

"We had people leave here, go back and get family members and friends, and bring them back two or three times, with different people, and telling them, 'You just have to come down and see these things,'" Kayser said. "A lot of the things that we have and will display, people will never see ever in any other location, even in museums, because there's only a couple of funeral museums in the nation, and most people will never have access to those."

For more information, call Kayser's Chapel and Crematory at (509) 765-7848.