Bronze Handles

An unusual bit of ephemera. The actual order book pages for Lloyd Mifflin's casket and vault from the Boyertown Company.

The Boyertown Burial Casket Company originated, sensibly enough, in Boyertown, Pennsylvania is 1893. They eventually went national and were, for a long time, THE casket company in the USA. This writer well remembers walking to grade school in Harrisburg and usually passing the Boyertown regional manufacturers, and seeing workers lining the caskets and adding various decorative handles as they set up on the warmer sunny days on their loading dock. Years later, they were kind enough to allow me to film them at work for a documentary film project I was producing while at Temple University film school.

The company closed their doors in 1988.