Edgar Ray Butterworth

Edgar Ray Butterworth (March 3, 1847 – January 1, 1921) was an American funeral director, believed to have coined the professional terms mortuary and mortician.

A slow migration west

Butterworth was born in 1847 in Newton Upper Falls, Massachusetts. His paternal grandfather, Noah Butterworth, served in the American Revolution. His father was William Ray Butterworth; his mother's name was Eliza née Norwood, also from an old New England family. In 1857 his family moved to Wright County, Minnesota, where his father worked as a millwright for six years. This was during the period of the Sioux Wars in that frontier region. When the American Civil War, broke out, Edgar Butterworth tried to enlist but he was too young. In 1863, the family returned to Massachusetts. located in the Masonic Temple

E. R. Butterworth & Sons

The business was soon renamed E. R. Butterworth & Sons. Five of his sons joined him in the business: the aforementioned Gilbert Butterworth and his half-brothers Charles Norwood Butterworth, Frederick Ray Butterworth, Harry Edgar Butterworth, and Benjamin Kent Butterworth. Gilbert and Frederick would be the longest-lived, and were followed into the business by several of their own sons. By 1929, when Butterworth's son Gilbert was managing the business, it had already remained in the hands of a single family longer than any other Seattle funerary business. then to 1426-28 Third Avenue; and on October 1, 1903, to the custom built Butterworth Block at 1921 First Avenue. although the market was not founded until 1907. The building has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since May 14, 1971.

The Butterworth Block The building had the first elevator on the West Coast of the United States, used to transport bodies. The basement, accessible through Post Alley at the rear, is now (as of 2009) home to Kells Irish Restaurant & Pub. Whereas few traces 1921 First Avenue's original use remain at Kells, and the original wood salvaged from the basement to build the bar top and tables.

Character Butterworth was a pioneer of the modern approach to the business of undertaking. Clarence Bagley credits him as the likely coiner of the terms mortuary and mortician. He owned the first hearse north of the Columbia River. During Butterworth's lifetime, his business annually forgave the debts of customers who were not able to pay. Butterworth & Sons were also early adopters of the embalming techniques that now distinguish American funerary traditions from those more common in Western Europe.

He was a member of numerous fraternal organizations. He helped organize the Seattle lodges of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and the Ancient Order of United Workmen, and was also a member of the Knights of Pythias, the Independent Order of Foresters, the Woodmen of the World, the Royal Arcanum and the Independent Order of Good Templars, as well as being a charter member of the Alaskan Brotherhood Association, and a life member Seattle's Arctic Club. He was an active member of Temple Baptist Church, but also a practicing spiritualist.

Inevitably, not all of the corpses handled by Butterworth had died peacefully. During the years of the Yukon Gold Rush (which began in 1897), parts of Seattle were dangerous and violent. Undertakers were paid $50 per body to take dead bodies off the street; Butterworth & Sons partook of that business. Butterworth, the city's leading undertaking business of the period, also handled many victims of the Spanish flu pandemic. Later, when health faddist doctor Linda Burfield Hazzard was convicted over one of the several patients she starved to death, Butterworth & Sons were implicated in the scandal, because they had cremated one of her victims, then produced a different, less emaciated body for the funeral. The mortuary was not convicted of any wrongdoing, but Hazzard went to prison.