Funeral homes try new centers Families seeking places to gather

Food and funerals have always gone hand in hand.

Before or after burial services, families tend to want friends and relatives to join them for food, drink or sharing memories, but finding a venue can be vexing.

The host family’s home may be too small, a local restaurant too restrictive or a church hall too solemn.

Increasingly, Maine funeral homes are edging toward offering a variation on the growing “event center” market. Funeral directors call them “family centers.”

Brookings-Smith was the first funeral home in Maine to open such facilities, General Manager Jim Fernald said Wednesday. It has family centers in Bangor and Brewer.

In a highly mobile world, Fernald said, the centers have been a welcome place for families, sometimes from far away, to gather. In a Maine winter, the centers are a place to congregate when burials are not possible because of frozen ground or for memorial gatherings with no religious affiliation, he said.

Brookings-Smith owner Gary Smith said Duncan-Graves Funeral Home in Presque Isle opened a family center within the past year.

Burpee, Carpenter & Hutchins Funeral Home in Rockland is joining the trend.

Soon it will open BC&H Family Center in the former Grand Army of the Republic Building on Limerock Street, adjacent to the funeral home.

“We’d like [a name] not quite so sterile as ‘family center,”‘ said owner Walker Hutchins. New names are being considered.

BC&H paid the city of Rockland $170,000 for the center’s building and land. Hutchins declined to disclose the cost of renovations.

The use of the facility, including coffee, tea, hostess, set-up and cleanup, will be in the $200 range, Hutchins said. “We want to keep the cost as low as possible. My intent is not to compete on any level.”

Hutchins was familiar with Brookings-Smith’s centers, and Hobbs Funeral Home in South Portland offers Hobbs Hospitality Center.

“Some people might want a ‘Let’s roast Uncle Charlie’ type service – a far more less-formal atmosphere,” Hutchins said. At BC&H Family Center, clients decide how formal or relaxed.

In Rockland, a large main room will be accessed from a new full-length porch on the side of the building, which wraps around to the existing front entrance. It will allow seating for 160 people. The room can be set up in a round-table arrangement or in an open-floor layout for dancing.

The center offers a kitchen for catering or homemade meals and a sitting room warmed by the glow of a period fireplace.

“We have all sorts of ideas” for the center, Hutchins said. They include a menu of service packages that includes catering options, music selections and personalized video “memory” albums projected on video screens. The center will be set up with video screens so that activities in the funeral home can be viewed simultaneously at the family center. “We’re all wired for that now,” he said. They also offer regular television broadcasts.

The business has changed from the days when the Burpee brothers – Nathaniel and Samuel – first began making wagons and furniture in 1830 on Winter Street behind today’s Huston-Tuttle in Rockland. They soon started making coffins, too.

“That’s the way a lot of funeral homes started,” Hutchins said.

Burpee, Carpenter & Hutchins bought the former GAR Building in 2003, which housed the Shore Village Museum and Maine Lighthouse Museum collection. The purchase of the GAR building and land has allowed parking capacity to expand threefold.

Funeral homes are doing more today than the traditional arrangements for obituaries, wakes, church services, funerals and burials. Cremations, memorial services and product sales are other aspects of the business.

Three years ago, Burpee, Carpenter & Hutchins started a annual memorial event to give families a chance to talk about loved ones who they will be missing for the first holiday season. Some 300 people attended last year.

“It made such a difference to know I’m not the only person feeling this way,” Hutchins said.