The town that invented the pet casket

Somewhere in the country a beloved beagle is being buried in a coffin that started its life in Gladstone. Dennis and Jeanne Hoegh began making pet caskets in their basement here in 1966 — the first company in America to sell one. The idea was odd enough that People magazine eventually came calling. In 1971 a Small Business Administration loan let them move out of the basement and build a real factory on the edge of town. That same year Dennis helped start the International Association of Pet Cemeteries. A whole quiet industry traces back to this one corner of the Upper Peninsula.

The caskets are vacuum-formed from high-impact styrene, the same tough plastic used in hard hats. They come in eight sizes. The smallest is a ten-inch box for a hamster; the biggest runs fifty-two inches, built for a dog the size of a St. Bernard. For decades the factory ran public tours. The strangest, most charming stop was the little model pet cemetery out back, with tiny headstones and a crematorium plaque that read, “If Christ would have had a little dog, it would have followed Him to the Cross.”

The Hoeghs sold the business in 2011, and it has changed hands a couple of times since, but it never left Gladstone. A crematorium added in 2012 now serves veterinarians all across the U.P. The company ships roughly a hundred caskets a week to all fifty states and Canada, run by fewer than a dozen people in a town of about 5,000. Next time you drive M-35 along Little Bay de Noc, know that the grief of pet owners from Florida to Alaska gets answered, in a small way, by a factory on this shore.