CUMMING, Ga. — Jack Allen, director of operations and former owner of Ingram Funeral Home & Crematory, said his neighbors used to give him a hard time about his line of work.
Until someone they knew suddenly died of a heart attack.
“Once they come here and see what you do, then they go, ‘Whoa. Thank you so much. We had no clue what all you do,’” said Allen, sitting across from Joey Wallace, Ingram’s office manager. Allen endearingly referred to the more soft-spoken Wallace as his “second wife” because of his aptitude in keeping him organized, like finding a contract from four years ago at the drop of a hat. The pair have been working together for two decades.
“You don’t know what the funeral business is like until you deal with one,” Allen said.
Allen took ownership of Ingram in 2004, after its founders ran it for nearly 80 years. Royston Ingram founded the business in 1928, and his three sons took it over in the ’70s.
Allen said the Ingram brothers, George and Robert, mulled over the decision to sell for quite a while. They wanted to sell to an individual, rather than a corporation.
The negotiation with Allen lasted two years.
“We paid it off, and we did pretty well,” Allen said.
Ingram, one of three funeral businesses in Forsyth County, handles about 800 services a year. Sixty percent of those are cremations, a more affordable, convenient option than a burial.
“I’d be surprised if someone doesn’t have a [crematory] now,” Allen said.
When he got started in the funeral business, there were only two crematories in the state.
History in the walls
The building, some 18,000 square feet, has a life of its own, housing both the Ingram’s former home and funeral business. Walking in, living quarters were on the left, a fireplace still there, separated by the main hall which was once a driveway. To the right was the funeral home, the old brick painted white.
The A-frame of the Ingram home can still be seen at a certain angle from outside.
In a tour, Wallace said the founder would walk through a tunnel under the building to go to work, bypassing visitations. Royston’s children would also use it as a place to roller skate.
Today, the basem*nt, what Allen refers to as the “bowels,” serves as storage space, filled with items like caskets and embalming machines.
The crematory is down there, too, open to the outside. It was being repaired — a machine that burns bodies at around 1,700 degrees, over an average of three hours, requires regular maintenance.
Wallace, a Forsyth County native, recalled his grandmother passing away in the ’90s and the showroom, a state requirement for funeral homes, as being downstairs.
Now, it’s closer to the main entrance.
A casket made of premier mahogany with a champagne velvet interior, priced at nearly $10,000, lays against the back wall under a sign that read, “Tell the Story. Remember the Life.” A wall of urns, vault samples and flag cases are on display in the showroom as well.
Funeral homes must also have a chapel. Ingram’s has a capacity of around 230 people, with more space across the business’ three visitation rooms, two that can be partitioned in half.
While more than half the business is cremations, there are still several full-time embalmers. One wheels a body into the “catch-all” room from the embalming room that houses his workstation. Bodies in the catch-all area are ready to be placed in the casket, then transported for visitation.
Wallace said embalmers must go through 18 months of training and serve at a funeral home under an apprenticeship.
In another room, bodies are prepared by beauticians and hairdressers. Ingram keeps a list of recommendations in case families don’t have their own.
Lifelong career
Allen has as much experience in the funeral business as one could have, coming from his own family’s firm which serviced 1,700 funerals a year across four locations in Atlanta.
His great-grandfather Hyatt M. Patterson started the business in 1880, eventually passing it down to Allen’s grandfather, then his father Dan Allen, and after he died, Allen’s mother, Lee Patterson Allen.
A refurbished horse-drawn hearse, at the end of the main hall, is said to have been in Allen’s family. Black-and-white photos and illustrations of the Patterson business hang nearby.
A May 1945 issue of The Southern Funeral Director details the funeral arrangements of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose embalming was performed by Fred Patterson, Allen's grandfather. Roosevelt died in Warm Springs.
“Fred W. Patterson, owner and manager of H.M. Patterson & Son, was at home in Atlanta smoking a leisurely after-dinner cigar when his phone rang at 7:40 p.m.,” Managing Editor Beth J. Herzog writes. “It was THE CALL, probably the biggest and most important ever experienced by a contemporary funeral director.”
Allen recalled seeing his first dead body at 12 years old.
“My dad didn’t want me to sit at home, not have anything to do, so he sent me down there to work,” Allen said.
Death became less of a shock for Allen. But, he has never really been “spooked,” though he said being in any funeral home at night can be strange, with creaks and pops and the sounds of doors closing. Allen said the sounds are usually explainable.
“You know people talk about ghosts and all this stuff,” he said. “I haven’t seen one in 40 years.”
Allen said he did not intend to go into the family business, with a dream to do advertising work for Coca-Cola. He described the strained dynamics of the family affair and the little money his three brothers were making with their embalming license.
But he stayed, with not much of a choice because of the few jobs available in the early ’80s. When his father died, he helped his mother grow H.M. Patterson & Son dramatically.
“I was 26 years old, in charge of four funeral homes with 80 employees, doing $3 million a year revenue,” Allen said.
Allen’s family sold the business and began consulting work with funeral homes that were struggling. Tired of constant travel, they sought Ingram.
Big growth
Before Allen bought Ingram, it had serviced around 300 funerals a year — a respectable number considering most mom ’n’ pops average about a third of that.
The increase can be attributed to the county’s population growth, of more than 100,000 people since the early 2000s. Allen said many transplants are older, folks who didn’t want to leave after visiting their kids and grandkids.
“To me, it ended up being more like a retirement community, which, because of that, probably added to our growth,” Allen said. “We got so big so fast that it was hard to handle some days.”
It was especially hard to handle during the COVID-19 pandemic, which added around 100 funerals a year at Ingram. It became too much for Allen, leading him to sell off to Park Lawn Corporation in 2021, which owns nearly 170 funeral homes across the country.
“It was killing me, and it was killing all of us actually,” Allen said. “...Some of the firms had so many deaths that they had to rent refrigerator trucks just to keep the bodies in until they could do something with them.”
During that time, the Ingram staff had to adapt to ever-changing guidelines, from no funerals at all to conducting them with a 20-person maximum.
“Those parts made it very unusual, having the supplies dealing with the huge volume,” Allen said. “It was very trying times.”
New owner
Allen said he sometimes wishes he would have kept Ingram, with all the extra hoops the company has to jump through. The bureaucracy.
But, much of the stress has been lifted, from retaining increasingly expensive health insurance for employees to navigating legal issues.
“I knew that they would have more stability with a corporation in the long run,” Allen said.
Park Lawn has an on-call legal department when Allen is having trouble determining who has the legal authority over a deceased person. He said he deals with attorneys more than he’d like.
“[The body is] just like the property of an estate, who has the legal right to it” Allen said. “If we don’t do it right, we get sued.”
Legal issues have led to Ingram holding bodies for months. But bodies aren’t like stacking wood, he said.
“It’s a body that is deteriorating,” Allen said. “You have to do something with it.”
Allen said he has had to get court orders, usually a quick procedure because the issue at hand is “cut and dried” — often a fight between exes.
A caring staff
Wallace, who started his career in insurance, said he finds his job of two decades rewarding.
“Joey knows a lot more of the families than I do, being born and raised here,” Allen chimed in. “So, it’s somebody at his church. It’s a preacher he knew. It’s one of his best friend’s parents. There’s a connection, always, with these guys, and so to them, it’s personal.”
Most of the staff are local to Forsyth County. One funeral director has been with Ingram for nearly 40 years.
Allen attributes the success of Ingram Funeral Home & Crematory to the staff’s level of care, which involves customizing services.
“If somebody wants to bring theirHarley-Davidsonmotorcycle in here … they bring it in,” Allen said.
He said if it’s not illegal, staff will do it — except for drinking because it’s a liability, though he’ll allow a toast behind closed doors.
Customization also means being mindful of religious tradition.
“We can have a Greek Orthodox — which sounds funny in Forsyth County, but there’s quite a few Greek Orthodox people here — a Muslim, Indian, Asian and a Baptist [service] in the same week,” Allen said.
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