Many dead, some not-so-dead, mark Prugh’s history
The Hawk Eye newspaper reporter that interviewed Prugh was fortunate to have the 74-year-old sit for a conversation because Isaac was a man that liked to keep busy. When not attending the funeral home, he served as county coroner, council alderman and occasional fire chief. He was a furniture manufacturer, a staunch Republican and active on both the sanitation and market committees. He was also a story teller and his years of serving the community would have given him a wealth of anecdotes. But, he took pride in keeping these tales confidential.
Isaac was born on a Ohio farm in 1828 and as a teenager guided strings of pack horses through the Allegheny mountains to Baltimore and Philadelphia. He was also apprenticed to a cabinet maker earning $20 a month but the west beckoned and in 1852 he decided to join his brother, Jacob, then a furniture maker in Burlington. He took passage on a steamboat and arrived with so little money that he had to borrow $4 to pay the freight charges for his luggage and tools.
Issac and Jacob turned their considerable talent to making furniture but because they were often called on to make caskets they decided to go into the funeral business. In August 1852 they bought out the undertaker Richard Wait and opened an undertaking establishment at the corner of Main and Valley streets. The two advertised that they would keep wooden and metallic coffins on hand and, if desired, would furnish a hearse and carriage for the funeral.
The Prughs entered a market that was crowded with coffin-makers and undertakers but Burlingtonians kept dying at a prodigious rate so many of these enterprises initially prospered. R. Thorn of the Burlington Chair factory was selling coffins and Lyman Cook and Company stocked Fisk’s Patented Metallic Burial Cases and D. Remick, liveryman, added a hearse to his stock of buggies, carriages and light wagons.
Funerals in the 19th century were simple affairs. The deceased was washed and dressed by relatives or friends and placed into a coffin. Undertakers didn’t offer many services and were primarily casket salesmen. Funerals were held in homes or churches and usually conducted within 24 hours of death.
Isaac kept a recordbook of every funeral ceremony with which he was involved and the book stated that the first business conducted by the undertakers was a coffin sold to Jacob Sypher for the burial of his wife. The coffin was black walnut and Sypher paid $7. The box was built by George Wagner and he was paid paid 75 cents for his labor.
In those early years of Burlington, most of the coffins were wood and Isaac remembered the coffin of Judge Charles D. Mason. When the judge was a young man he planted a walnut tree with the intention of growing it for timber for his coffin. It got to be a big tree and the judge finally cut it down and came to Issac and said: “Prugh, when I die I want you to make the lumber out of that tree into a coffin for me.”
Judge Mason was to last only a few more weeks, but true to his promise, Isaac obtained the sawed boards from Mason’s barn and had the coffin fashioned as directed.
Some other stories that Isaac would share with the reporter did not deal with death but rather with near misses. He remembered that on at least one occasion his customer walked through the door on her own power.
“I had a girl that wanted to turn herself over to me to be buried before she was dead,” Prugh said. “She was a girl who had been working in town but grown despondent over her condition in life so she had given up and tried to kill herself,” Prugh said. “She took a big dose of morphine and came to my establishment just in time for me to get her body when she died, but she arrived a little too soon. I got her to sit down and sent some of the boys out after Dr. Fleming.
“When he got there we managed to deprive myself of a burial that I was very glad to miss. I never do a good job when they come around before they are dead.”
Isaac also recalled another near miss when a county physician brought him the corpse of an Italian one evening about 9 o’clock. He told Prugh he would be back the following morning with the certificate for the burial.
“Well, I stretched the Italian out on a cooling table and let him lie there for some time but then I got to wondering if the man was really dead as I thought I detected signs of life in the body,” Isaac reported. “I concluded to go to work and see what I could do with him. I went up and saw my wife and she made me a mustard plaster as big as a man’s body. I wrapped the fellow up in it and let him lie there while I went out to attend another death.
“When I came back I asked the corpse if it felt any better and receiving an affirmative grunt , I poured some whisky down his throat. I repeated the process later in the night and when the doctor came in with the burial permit I took him up to the house and the man was drinking a cup of coffee. He lived a good many years after that.”
The Prugh Funeral Business has also lasted a good many years and as it marks its 156th year it is recognized as the oldest family-run business in Iowa.
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