John Gravenstine, inventor.  Corpse-Preserving Casket.  Ca. 1871.

The rural cemetery movement grew largely out of Americans’ desire to protect their loved ones’ graves in perpetuity. After 1850, however, popular attention turned increasingly toward preserving the corpse itself. The Civil War’s surfeit of soldiers’ bodies, many falling far from home, was a late-coming if decisive factor in the shift.

John Gravenstine’s design amounted to an icebox set atop a sealed casket. As such it combined existing technologies: the mobile refrigeration unit (the first ice-cooled boxcar dated to 1851) and the airtight coffin. Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane (1820-1857) had been buried in the latter at Laurel Hill. How many of the cemetery’s residents spent time in Gravenstine’s container is unknown.

John Gravenstine, inventor. Imp[rovemen]ts. in Corpse-Preserving Cases and Refrigerators. 1871.

John Gravenstine, inventor. Refrigerating App[aratu]s. 1871.

In these two patent drawings, the improbably named Gravenstine reveals the details of his invention. The coffin-shaped spacer (Imp[rovemen]ts, Fig. 4) permitted the accommodation of a corpse “of large size.” Graventsine deemed the refrigeration chamber suitable not only to corpse-preserving caskets but also to “refrigerators, or to any closed vessel within which it is desired to maintain animal or vegetable matter in a cool condition.”

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