Laughter Undertaking Company

Before the 1970s, a town's undertaker usually ran its ambulance as well. Hearses were among the few vehicles that could carry a person lying down, so funeral homes took up emergency transport more or less by default, often with little medical training and under no national standards. A 1966 National Academy of Sciences report on accidental death pushed for trained crews, and by the early 1970s professional emergency services were replacing the funeral-home fleets. Laughter's ambulance, which ran until the mid-1970s, belonged to the last stretch of that old arrangement.

What the plaque says

Laughter Undertaking Company Dan T. Laughter (1871-1952) first worked as an undertaker while employed in a northeast Texas furniture store. In 1900, he came to Abilene, and five years later he founded this undertaking company with his partner, C. M. Tandy. In 1908, at the flip of a coin, the firm came under the full ownership of Laughter. Until the mid-1970s, the company operated an ambulance in connection with its funeral home. Since the early years of the 20th century, Laughter Undertaking Company has been a significant Abilene business institution. Supplemental Plate: Operated since 1945 by Russel and Willena North and their family; now known as North's Funeral Home. (1985)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Frontier Texas! — 0.6 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 13 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 14 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.
• Abilene State Park — 17 mi
  A pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.

More markers nearby

• Site of Guitar Mansion — steps away
• Site of Abilene's First School — steps away
• Abilene Reporter-News — 0.3 mi
• The Texas & Pacific Railway: First Railroad Across West Texas — 0.3 mi