Holland History: Peter Ver Plank changed the casket industry

Peter Ver Plank was a non-conformist. He innovated a very old industry.

The casket industry has existed since the 1800s. Its roots lie with funeral directors, then called undertakers or morticians, who operated small furniture stores and built caskets as a side business.

Caskets replaced coffins, a French word, meaning "little baskets." In the 1700s, coffins were hexagonal in shape, tapered at the top and bottom, to resemble the human shape. The coffin industry expanded when English law allowed all people, not only the rich, to be buried in a coffin. The British brought this practice to their colonies in America.

Simple wooden coffin burials remained the custom until the Civil War. Then, because mourners wished to provide their loved ones more dignity in death, the industry changed. Because the word "casket" meant a vessel that stores precious goods, it began to replace the word "coffin," and an industry sprang up to mass produce caskets with a more stately rectangular design.

With the rare exception of an occasional iron casket, the industry did its work in wood. Peter Ver Plank changed it all.

Peter was born to Francois and Cornelia DePooter Ver Planke in 1877 in the Province of Zeeland, The Netherlands. In 1889, the family immigrated to the village of Borculo. There, they purchased a farm. Francois may have worked as a mason, but whatever he did, the family remained poor.

As a young adult, Peter found work in various furniture factories in the area, including, we think, Zeeland's Wolverine Furniture. In 1897, he married Abigail DeKraker in Zeeland. Their first child, Cora, was born in 1898, followed by Joseph, Frank, Angelina, Marvin and Robert.

Then, one of Ver Plank's employers discovered Peter had talent for woodcarving and sent him to art school. After Ver Plank had worked off the sponsorship, he took a job with the Kroehler Furniture Company in Elgin, Illinois.

While at Kroehler, Ver Plank worked part-time at the Western Casket Hardware Company, a maker of wooden caskets. While there, he became involved in the design and manufacturing of wooden ornamental fixtures, the decorative corners of caskets.

In 1904, Ver Plank returned to Zeeland and, with the help of investors, formed the Ver Plank Manufacturing Company. As president and salesperson, he traveled on three-week train trips to visit customers in large cities in the central and southern United States.

In 1905, he sold his company to the Waddell Manufacturing Company of Grand Rapids and remained there for a year as a salesperson.

In 1906, Ver Plank started making ornaments again. But he didn't make them out of wood — instead, he used molds to make casket handles and lead to make decorative corner pieces, a soft metal that didn't require much heat. This innovation allowed him to recruit investors and launch the Zeeland Ornamental Company.

In 1908, Ver Plank incorporated his business and built a new factory out of Veneklasen brick along Colonial Street at 160 Washington Ave. — across from the Colonial Clock Company in what became known to locals as the corner of "time and eternity."

The original shareholders were Ver Plank and his sons, plus Percy Ray, I.O. Croft, Robert Leenhouts and E.J. Pruim. In 1918, E.J Pruim was president, D.F. Boonstra was secretary and Ver Plank was treasurer. His new company made decorative metal fixtures not only for caskets, but also for circus wagons.

By the 1920s, metal caskets — made of steel, not iron — were growing in popularity. So, in 1925, VerPlank developed a process to manufacture casket shells and marketed his product as "hardware with caskets attached."

He followed up this innovation with the production of complete metal caskets and pioneered a process for electroplating his lead fixtures in gold, copper, or silver, thus greatly enhancing the dignity of the casket without the equivalent cost.

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Because the board granted Ver Plank a generous profit-sharing plan, as Zeeland Ornamental grew and prospered, Ver Plank was able not only to buy out his investors, but also invest in property in and around Zeeland. To help his wife, Abigail, he hired a domestic, who was about the age of his oldest child. Religiously, in a town of Dutch Calvinists, he chose to be a devout mason.

We'll tell more of his story next week.

— Community Columnist Steve VanderVeen is a resident of Holland. Contact him through start-upacademeinc.com.