J. L. Woods' Undertaking Company

🏛️The era

When Jebb Lee Woods arrived in Somerville in 1900, the business of death in small-town America was changing. Through much of the nineteenth century, families cared for their own dead. They washed and dressed the body at home, held the wake in the parlor, and often bought a coffin from the local cabinetmaker or general store.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, that began to change. Embalming had become more widely known after the Civil War and slowly spread from cities to the countryside. Undertaking grew into a recognized profession with its own training, tools and standards. Funeral "parlors" took over the rituals that had once happened in family homes.

Somerville, in Burleson County in the Brazos Valley of Central Texas, was a railroad town in a farming region. In places like this the change to professional funeral services often came gradually, and one enterprising local figure usually led it.

👥People & events

Jebb Lee Woods was born in 1872 and came to Somerville in 1900. His first job was with his uncle at the Cowboy Merchant Store. Coffins were on sale there alongside the other goods a country store stocked, a reminder of how ordinary, and how practical, death once was in rural life.

Woods stayed in the trade. In 1911 he became the town undertaker and opened the first funeral parlor in Burleson County. That was a significant step: families now had a dedicated place and a dedicated professional to help them through a loss.

The business kept up with the times. Embalming began in 1914. Coffins were not built in a local factory; they were bought from traveling salesmen, who were a familiar sight in small-town commerce back then. For years funeral processions moved behind a horse-drawn hearse, which stayed in service until 1929. Picture that hearse on Somerville's streets well into the age of the automobile.

Woods died in 1932, but the business did not end with him. His descendants carried it on. It later became Strickland Funeral Home, Inc., and it is still a family business, more than a century after Woods first sold coffins in his uncle's store.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The story of J. L. Woods' Undertaking Company is a small-town version of a national change. Across the United States, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw deathcare move from homes to professionals. Undertakers took on embalming, funeral parlors replaced front-room wakes, and motor hearses eventually replaced horse-drawn carriages.

The path here, from coffins on a store shelf to a full funeral parlor, then embalming, then motorized service, follows that professionalization step by step. The dates on this marker let you watch one community move from one way of mourning to another.

It is also a story about family enterprise. Many American businesses that serve a community at its most vulnerable moments have passed from parent to child. That continuity built trust in towns where everyone knew the undertaker by name.

🧭If you visit

Somerville is a small town in Burleson County, in the rolling farm and ranch country of Central Texas. When you find the marker, imagine the town in 1900: a general store selling coffins beside dry goods, and later a horse-drawn hearse moving slowly down the street.

This is a working community, and the business the marker honors is still a family operation. Be respectful. It serves grieving families, so treat it as a place of work rather than a tourist attraction.

Somerville fits easily into a drive through the Brazos Valley. The Bryan–College Station area is nearby, and the lake country around Somerville draws outdoor visitors. Stop here for a moment to think about how Americans cared for their dead a century ago.