Bakersfield’s Hearse House: Among Vermont’s Last Horse-Drawn Funeral Garages

At the rear of Maple Grove Cemetery in Bakersfield, right where Route 108 meets East Bakersfield Road, sits a small building with a job so specific it doesn’t exist anymore: storing the town’s horse-drawn hearse. It’s easy to drive past without a second look. It’s also one of the few buildings left in Vermont built for exactly one purpose, and it’s still doing more or less what it was built to do — just without the horse.

LANDMARK HISTORY — THE HEARSE HOUSE

Before the automobile, moving a coffin from a church, a home, or a public tomb to the cemetery was a shared community job, and the vehicle that did it — a horse-drawn hearse — was often owned by the town rather than any one family or undertaker. That hearse needed somewhere dry to sit between funerals, out of Vermont’s weather and ready to go on short notice. Bakersfield’s answer, built around 1890, still stands at the rear of Maple Grove Cemetery: a small, ornate building known simply as the Hearse House.

Some online accounts seem to mix the details of this building with the more famous, and very plain, hearse house in Chester, VT… but this is an entirely different specimen altogether. The building carries scroll-cut gingerbread trim along its gable, contrasting green paint. It featured a full porch with a driver’s entrance and two larger doors for the cart, one on each side, to allow the horse to bring the carriage in one and out the other without the need to back the hearse into place. Somebody clearly wanted the town’s hearse kept somewhere presentable, not just dry. That’s worth noting, because it may be part of why the building is still standing at all — a shed nobody cared about gets torn down the moment its one job disappears, but something someone bothered to make handsome tends to get a second look before the wrecking bar comes out.

And the Hearse House survived, even after its one job disappeared. As motorized funeral vehicles took over in the early twentieth century, town-owned horse-drawn hearses went the way of the buildings that housed them — most were sold off, dismantled, or simply left to rot once nobody needed them anymore. Hearse houses like Bakersfield’s were common across small New England towns for exactly this reason: shared equipment needed shared storage. Very few of those buildings are still standing today.

Bakersfield’s survived. The Town of Bakersfield still owns it, and current town planning documents describe it as potentially eligible for historic recognition — though it hasn’t been formally listed. These days it’s used for storage by the town’s Cemetery Commission, and the same planning materials note it needs repair. It’s not a museum piece behind glass; it’s a working outbuilding in a cemetery that’s still in use, which is, in its own way, exactly the kind of quiet survival that makes it worth a second look.

I wasn’t actually looking for the Hearse House when I found it. I’d stopped in Bakersfield on a bright autumn day to shoot the town green, and the cemetery sits right behind it. That’s when the building caught my eye — not because it’s grand, but because the trim on it is brighter and more elaborate than you’d expect from a building most accounts describe as built purely for utility. Against the fall color and a clear sky, it was too good a frame to pass up.

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