A photo from Chicago Mayor Harold Washington’s funeral is framed in the production office of the American Wilbert Vault facility in the city’s Mt. Greenwood neighborhood.
In the photo of the graveside service, flowers are heaped on top of the burnished casket, which rests within a bronze-lined Continental model burial vault. The concrete vault–guaranteed to remain airtight and watertight for 100 years–was made at the Wilbert Vault production plant, 11118 S. Rockwell St.
In another, less publicized event, the company donated a vault for the reburial with military honors of a South Side veteran, Paul Oziemkiewicz, who died during last summer’s brutal heat wave and had been given a pauper’s funeral by Cook County officials.
A burial vault is not a luxury item. An outer container made of concrete is required by cemeteries and “it can be as simple or as ornate as the family chooses,” said Ginger Morgan at Thompson and Kuenster Funeral Home in Oak Lawn. A burial vault is purchased from a funeral home along with the casket, or directly from a cemetery. At their most prosaic, vaults or, more simply, grave boxes, are designed to keep cemetery lawns level.
“As the years went by, the outer wood boxes (used as vaults) rotted away. Eventually the caskets disintegrated and the graves collapsed,” said Bruce Leeseburg, the general superintendent of American Wilbert. So, to make maintenance easier, cemeteries, especially the larger ones, began to require sturdier burial containers. Into the breach stepped the L.G. Haase Manufacturing Co., a concrete products business and the forerunner of American Wilbert Vault, the nation’s largest manufacturer of vaults.
Leo Haase was the son of German immigrants. He and his brother Emil opened Forest Home Cemetery in 1874 and, to finance the early cost of operation, sold gravel from a quarry on another section of their property in Forest Park. The cemetery was successful, but Leo Haase saw a growing problem with the “confusing hodgepodge of corner posts and lot markers” that people used to mark their lot boundaries, according to a written history of the company.
Using the knowledge he had gained in the quarry operation, Haase began to make his own standardized concrete products for cemeteries. The manufacturing company was incorporated in 1880 and produced cemetery lot markers, benches, hydrant boxes, catch basin covers, sewer and well tiles, and sectional concrete boxes with lids that were used as outer burial receptacles at Forest Home Cemetery. Other cemeteries, which bought Haase’s concrete products, soon saw the advantages of the concrete vault as it applied to perpetual care.
Older grave sites had begun to sink and, as heavy machinery replaced manual labor, graves sometimes imploded when trucks or other equipment were driven on the grounds. Because the concrete vaults do not deteriorate like wood and are stronger–a top-of-the-line Wilbert vault can withstand up to 7,500 pounds of pressure per square inch–the containers prevented the formation of ridges and depressions that resulted from sinking graves.
According to Dolores Vendl, a spokeswoman for Catholic Cemeteries, which oversees 43 cemeteries within the Archdiocese of Chicago, “the containers really helped with the upkeep, and they make future burials easier. Everything is mechanized, and we can’t get the machines in to dig graves if the ground isn’t solid.”
L.G. Haase Co. was bought by Leo’s nephew Wilbert Haase in 1913. Wilbert changed the name to American Vault Works and improved the concrete vault by inventing a waterproof version. In 1947, the company was renamed the American Wilbert Vault Corp. The company sells 350,000 brand-name units each year, which are the company’s more ornate offerings, as well as plain liners, and has sold more than 9 million vaults since the 1880s.
According to the National Concrete Burial Vault Association in Battle Creek, Mich., Wilbert Vault is the biggest in terms of sales of concrete vaults from its own plants and through license agreement with manufacturers in the U.S. and Canada. The field is small, according to spokesman Tom Monaghan, with just a half dozen companies in the concrete burial vault industry.
The facility on 111th Street opened in 1920 during a period of expansion overseen by Wilbert Haase. The business was growing quickly because of influenza epidemics in 1918 and 1919, when the death rate in the Chicago area reached 1,500 for every 100,000 people, and, again, in 1922 and 1923, when the death rate from the epidemic climbed back to 500 per 100,000 people. Only Wilbert Vault Corp. had the inventory to meet the demand.
Molded concrete units are stacked seven high inside the production facility, which produces 45 vaults a day. The Southwest Side plant is one of four manufacturing and distribution facilities Wilbert owns, with the others in Des Plaines, Elgin and Chicago. Overall, including the headquarters in Forest Park, the company employs about 60.
The company also licenses more than 300 manufacturers and distributors from New York to Texas.
The company franchises its products, said president Gregory Reichle, in much the same way McDonald’s franchises its hamburger outlets.
“The production facilities pay royalties to the vault company,” said Reichle, 52, of Riverside, and equipment and specifications are monitored by Wilbert.
American Wilbert Vault is a wholesale dealer and sells directly to funeral homes. The vaults retail from $500 to $2,000. Plain vaults are available at cemeteries and run about $300. The company makes 11 different models, from molded concrete grave liners to ornately decorated vaults sealed and strengthened with high-impact plastic, or lined in bronze, copper or stainless steel. Wilbert Vault just introduced a new line, Cameo Rose, a pink and white vault lined with stainless steel, aimed at the female market.
“Our surveys found that buyers wanted a less masculine-looking vault,” Reichle said. And stainless steel was popular with women “because they were familiar with it from other products, like kitchenware,” he said.
Vaults are made in three sizes; the standard adult size is 30 by 86 inches. The company does not custom-design vaults. Burials that include a Cadillac as well as a casket are generally encased in concrete, said Leeseburg.
The concrete for the vaults is mixed at the Chicago plant. The materials–sand, stone and cement–are stored in silos behind the mud-colored warehouse. The building is close to a number of cemeteries: Mt. Hope, Mt. Olivet, Mt. Greenwood. The plant currently serves cemeteries in a territory that stretches from Indiana west to Elgin and from Mokena north to the Wisconsin border.
“There are so many cemeteries that even I haven’t visited them all,” said division manager Tom Shaven of Burbank, who has worked for Wilbert for 24 years.
Rows of molds line the noisy production room. Hydraulic lifts overhead carry buckets of concrete to be poured into greased molds containing wire mesh. The more expensive lined models are not made with reinforced concrete but are poured more thickly and gain strength when, after the concrete is dry, an airtight and watertight polystyrene liner is glued inside the container using an epoxy that binds the materials together, Leeseburg said.
The vaults dry in the molds for up to 18 hours. Using mallets, workers open the molds and hook the lids and containers, which together weigh about 3,000 pounds, to the hydraulic lift. Thick chains carry the vaults into the warehouse to cure for two to three weeks. The vaults are painted and a plaque engraved with the person’s name is set on the lid along with crucifixes, fraternal organization emblems or military insignia requested by the family. Fancier linings may be added, and the paint colors range from light and dark brown to blue, green or white threaded with lines of gold paint across a lid encrusted with decorative stones, as well as the Cameo Rose.
The vaults carry warranties of 50 to 100 years, depending on the model. The vaults seal out air and moisture, which can make a difference in the case of reburial. American Wilbert performs about a dozen disinterments each year in the Chicago area, many requested by retirees who are moving and want to reinter a spouse’s or other loved one’s remains in a cemetery near their new home.
“Anyone who has to go through the process of planning a funeral has a better feeling about our product,” said Reichle. “We sell peace of mind.”
