Carolina Mortuary

Dating back to the early 1900s, it was a widespread practice for funeral homes to provide ambulance services as well. A funeral home hearse would transport people to emergency rooms. Hearses were well suited to carrying a person quickly, comfortably, and horizontally. The vehicles were large enough to accommodate long stretchers and most funeral homes were on-call 24 hours a day. These ambulances saved countless lives that would otherwise have been lost by fulfilling a vital function. Even by the 1960s, more than half of America’s ambulances were not vehicles made specifically for the care and transport of patients. Instead, they were hearses, station wagons, vans, or trucks.

In 1966, Medicare regulations mandated that ambulances be staffed with personnel trained in Advanced First Aid by the Red Cross. Subsequently, a federal law was enacted to regulate the wages of ambulance attendants. As a result, numerous funeral homes were unable to generate sufficient income from patient transport to sustain their ambulance services. Due to this and other factors, many funeral homes nationwide chose to exit the ambulance service industry. Consequently, these services were transferred to hospitals, municipal fire departments, county authorities, and private or volunteer ambulance services.

For many years, Carolina Mortuary operated an ambulance service from its funeral home in rural Union, South Carolina. The funeral home has a chapel, two offices, two visitation rooms, a casket display room, and an embalming room. As Union County grew, other funeral homes opened, and with it came competition. Later in life, the funeral director’s health issues led to the closing of Carolina Mortuary around 2010. A competing funeral home purchased the business and reopened it under a new name, Green’s Funeral Home. Soon after, for reasons unknown, the owners shuttered the building and vacated the property. For more than a decade, the building sat idle. The last owners left so much behind including hearses and limos, caskets, and stacks of death certificates dating back more than 50 years.

In 2023, new owners decided to breathe life back into the forgotten building and reopen the funeral home. One of the owners grew up helping around the facility and recalled riding in one of the hearses as a kid, which inspired him to get into the funeral business. His whole family was embalmed through this funeral home too.

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