Frank E. Campbell

Frank E. Campbell

Frank Ellis Campbell was born July 4, 1872 in Camp Point, Adams County, Illinois. He learned the funeral trade by making caskets in what he called an undertaker's shop, and at the age of twenty moved to New York City to work in funeral parlors run by a minister. Not long after, he opened his own establishment on 23rd Street near Eighth Avenue. At a time when most funerals were still held in private homes and the deceased were transported in horse-drawn wagons, Campbell modernized the profession. He was among the first to use motorized hearses and limousines, began placing paid death notices in newspapers, introduced women to embalming and directing, and even purchased a private yacht, The Hour Glass, for transporting remains and scattering ashes at sea.

His reputation grew as he served prominent families and organized high-profile services. International attention followed the 1921 funeral of opera star Enrico Caruso. His name became permanently associated with celebrity funerals after the death of silent film idol Rudolph Valentino in 1926. Valentino's viewing in New York drew massive crowds and intense press coverage, making Campbell's funeral home widely known.

The Funeral of Rudolph Valentino in the chapel at Frank E, Campbell Funeral Home

Campbell died in Manhattan on January 19, 1934 at the age of sixty-one. He had arranged to be placed with his mother, Malvina, in the Bergen Crest Mausoleum in North Bergen, New Jersey, and his body was sealed in an oversized solid bronze casket. When the time came, the mausoleum crypts proved too small to receive the caskets. Instead of being entombed, both were left in a storage area under a stairway. There they remained, forgotten and unseen, for more than half a century.

In the late 1980s, Eugene Schultz, then president of the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel, discovered the situation while visiting Bergen Crest. He found the caskets blackened with age and still in the mausoleum's basement. Schultz spent years trying to have the building adapted to accept the remains but little progress was made. Eventually he located surviving relatives, including Frank Jr.'s widow in Florida and Frank's granddaughter Anne Campbell in Washington State, and secured permission for reinterment. With family consent and the cooperation of the funeral home's modern owners, arrangements were made to move Frank and his mother to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Each casket weighed about 1,400 pounds and required careful handling and cleaning.

Frank & Malvina's Gravestone, Courtesy of Neil Funkhouser

On October 3, 2001, after a proper service and full preparation, Frank Ellis Campbell and his mother were finally placed at rest in the Aster Plot, Section 210 at Woodlawn. After decades without a true burial place, both were given the dignified interment Campbell had originally intended.

Here is a great write up in American Cemetery about the reburial