By Brett Milam
Editor
When Moore Family Funeral Homes started, the United States was a baby of a country, only on its fifth president, James Monroe.
The country had a population of free persons just under 10 million, and was in the period historians call the Era of Good Feelings, with a bit of irony. The internal combustion engine was still six years away. And in nine years, Dr. Graham’s Honey Biskets, aka, graham crackers would be invented.
In 1820, the Moores didn’t start off as a funeral home. Keeping with their lineage of wearing many hats, the family lineage started with the manufacturing of horse-drawn carriages and farm implements.
Since the family had the reputation as skilled craftsmen, they would be called upon to build coffins for families in Clermont, Brown, and Hamilton Counties, according to its website.
Mary Moore is a sixth-generation Moore, whose father, Louis Moore, many locals would be familiar with. He served as funeral director, but was also a member of village council for eight years, a Batavia Township trustee for 26 years, a Park Board commissioner, and much more.
She didn’t stay in the family business, however, as she’s a teacher. Mary Moore said she really hates to see people sad. But she still hangs around the funeral home, located at 225 Spring St., a place where she grew up, and where dead bodies weren’t something to be frightened of, but rather incorporated into the innocuous fun of childhood.
“As a family business, you don’t think, you just do. You know, if the phone is ringing, you answer the phone. If a family needs to be met because they are bringing clothes or they need to drop something off and the funeral directors are busy, you just go over and you do it. We want to take care of our clients and make sure that they are – you can’t say happy – that they taken care of like they’re family,” she said.
Her husband, Scott Runck, who is also a Batavia Local Schools Board of Education member, and her nephew, Zach Moore, 27, continued and will continue the lineage, as the next generation.
When Mary Moore and Runck met in high school, that wasn’t the only match made: Runck was around her brothers so much that the funeral business became his new career path. Now, 35 years later, he’s still as passionate as ever about connecting with people.
“He’s got that empathetic – he’s like the perfect person to do this,” Mary Moore said.
Runck, the self-described outlaw of the bunch since he comes from outside the family, runs the Batavia location, while Mary Moore’s brother, Mark Moore, runs the Newtown location.
A quasi-history museum
Moore Family Funeral Homes is not only a place for funeral services, or the ambiance of birds chirping from its open, welcoming spaces; it’s also a quasi-history museum in its own right. That’s also befitting Runck’s personality and predilection, has he originally intended to get a history degree. 
“The one luxury this entity has is history,” Runck said, noting that’s a given when you’re in seventh generation (with Zach Moore).
Pictures adorn the walls from decades past, telling the story of the Moores, including an old American flag, preserved in a case. The flag is from the late 1700s to the early 1800s and made by a German woman. She wanted to assimilate and be American, so she made her own flag, Runck explained.
“That’s an original flag that actually flew here, so it’s a piece of history, and it’s actually a piece of family,” he said.
Other pictures include what the land and property looked like in the late 1870s and early 1880s, with a coach house, designed to hold the horse-drawn carriages, and wares. Every morning, the Moores would bring the items out in front, Runck explained.
“Because this was actually the hub between here and Cincinnati. You know, people didn’t want to travel all the way to Cincinnati to get a coach or a casket or a plow,” he said. “Because this is a story about a business that started producing something.”
When the Civil War started and soldiers were in caskets, which then needed to be transported to the cemetery, that’s when the funeral home aspect of the business really began to take shape.
“That’s how it all started. At those times – like he’s going to get a license from Ohio [pointing at Zach Moore] – you didn’t have to have a license, you just put another hat on and said I’m a funeral director now,” Runck said.
And it is that story of many hats: the carpenters, the dentists, the ambulance-drivers, mechanical engineers, and the inventors. Their grandfather, William Stirling Moore, invented the Moore Embalming Machine, which uses water pressure in lieu of a mechanical pump. He also had a patent for the mercury switch in automobiles, which is a device that could cut off the battery in case of an accident where the vehicle was leaning or flipped on its side.
The Sun covered his invention in the early 1900s in an article titled, “Invention of Batavian Highlights National Convention of Morticians.”
By the time Stirling presented the machine at the annual convention of the National Funeral Directors Association, he’d already been working on the machine for 20 years and using it for eight years at the funeral home.
“Leading morticians declared the Moore machine to be the first major improvement in embalming equipment in a generation,” The Sun reported, adding that the invention was the top of discussion among delegates to the convention.
The Sun also noted his mercury switch, calling it the “Moore-guard,” which the paper had previously done a feature story on.
“He was before his time, he really was,” Mary Moore said.
Being adaptable, service-minded
Zach More, leading the charge as the seventh generation, may bring the Moores back to the family tree roots of its first generation: he’s teaching himself carpentry on the side.
“I’m just thinking the industry is kind of evolving a little bit and I know for me, it kinda feels beneficial to be a part of it and learn about it, and a lot of people I feel don’t get that because they’re just not in the funeral business and a lot of funeral homes will just like, we’ll take care of everything, you just worry about some other things,” he said. “And I feel maybe bringing that back might be a good thing to do in the future.”
The next 200 years is, in some ways, the same as the last 200 years: doing whatever the families want of them. Being a funeral director and running a funeral home requires more adaptability than people may realize.
“It’s really in the term funeral director, that’s why I direct. It’s more or less, I take what the family wants and put it into motion, depending on whatever they want,” Runck said.
He explained that it’s about what the families want, not what he wants.
“I just love serving people. And I think if you don’t have that service mind in yourself, that you’re here for a certain purpose, not just a funeral director, but to be here at the worst part of a person’s life, sometimes worst part — again, sometimes people say to us, you know, it’s a blessing that this person’s passed away because they’ve been in pain — if you can help that person just a small bit, help them in any way,” he said. “You can never do anything to remove that, they will always have that sense of death, there’s nothing you can change after; you can make it a little easier for them, and that’s why you do everything for them.”
Another example of adapting to emerging trends is that of cremation. For cost reasons and being more earth-conscious (sensitive to the amount of concrete and chemicals going into the ground), creations and green burials are coming to fruition, Runck said.
“Cremation doesn’t always mean no service, though,” he said.
Looking to the future, Runck expects the funeral director role to continue evolving and changing. Zach Moore echoed that, saying he thinks setting up services via online platforms like Zoom or through text messages will outlast the COVID-19 pandemic, and become more normal, saying it’s a convenience thing.
Zach Moore said the funeral industry has been a step behind technology, so that’s an area he says they have to meet the demand everyone is going toward, which is being on the phone or the computer.
That fresh vision and eyes for the business is what’s helped it stay in the family business for 200 years: each generation has a different way of looking at the business, and keeping it evolving.
But, even as the Moores move ahead, there are still links to the past, such as the original hearse carriage they have from the 1870s. The wheels were being redone with the help of the Amish, Mary More said.
The legacy of the Moores is telling that story because Runck said, how many other businesses have been in business for 200 years?
“It’s a struggle to keep that story because it’s fading. And we don’t want to lose that history,” he said.
Staying connected to the community
The Moore Family Funeral Home is also having is also planning on having its Downtown Throwdown: Camaros vs. Mustangs on Sept. 13 on Main Street in Batavia.
All proceeds benefit the Southwest Ohio VFW Memorial Team.
Visit moorefamilyfuneralhomes.com for more information.