Owosso once built the world's caskets, 150 a day

Owosso made coffins for the world. The Owosso Casket Company started small, the way a lot of timber-town businesses did: the Woodard brothers ran a woodworking shop turning out sashes, blinds, and doors, and by 1882 they’d branched into caskets, the one wooden product everybody eventually needs. The factory went up on South Elm Street in 1885, burned in an 1888 fire, and was rebuilt fast. The railroads kept it fed, hauling in great loads of Michigan timber and hauling finished caskets back out to the rest of the country.

It grew into something almost hard to picture in a town this size. By the 1920s the Owosso Casket Company was the largest casket maker in the world, and around 1913 it was already finishing about 150 caskets a day. That’s a remarkable thing for one mid-Michigan factory — a steady line of polished boxes rolling out the door, bound for funeral homes hundreds of miles away.

It fit the place. By the 1870s Owosso had turned into a serious wood-products town, building furniture, carriages, even carousel horses, all of it riding on cheap lumber and good rail connections. The casket works was the biggest and most unusual fish in that pond — a quiet, slightly eerie specialty that made the town nationally known for exactly one thing nobody likes to talk about.

The big casket operation is long gone now, but its bones are still downtown. The old Woodard furniture-and-casket building survives along the river, brick and solid, a reminder that for a stretch of years this ordinary-looking county seat was, of all things, the place much of the country came to be buried in.