Suburban Amherst’s Harry A. Wedekindt Funeral Home, operated by twin brothers Raymond and Richard Wedekindt, has far-flung German ethnic origins in the East Side undertaking businesses started by their great-grandfather and great uncle, respectively, in the 1880s and 90s. Raymond and Richard’s great uncle, Adolph Wedekindt, opened his funeral home in the Hydraulics at 750 Seneca Street in 1894, expanding three years later to 761 Seneca. The Wedekindts, in the funeral business since 1887 (the year their grandfather Henry Wedekindt opened the first of several funeral homes on High Street), have done much to preserve the story of the family’s links to the Hydraulics.
The photos the Wedekindts have provided offer a wonderful glimpse into life (as well as death, an inevitable part of life) in the Hydraulics in the late 1890s, when Adolph Wedekindt plied his trade at of one of the district’s numerous cast iron-fronted storefronts (check out those leafy Corinthian capitals on the iron columns!). The photo above reveals even more insights: a sign in the window written in German, still spoken by many immigrant residents of the Hydraulics at the turn of the century, and reflections of commercial buildings across the street, including that of F. X. Winkler & Sons wholesale grocery, extant at 760 Seneca.
A. Wedekindt’s funeral parlor may have drawn much of its business from the two German-speaking congregations nearby, the Roman Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart, moved from Seneca Street to Clinton and Emslie streets in 1915, and St. Matthew’s Reformed & Evangelical Church, moved to McKinley Parkway in Hamburg in the 1960s but whose building still exists at Swan and Hagerman streets.
Adolph (portrait below) was the middle son of Henry Wedekindt, a German native born in Hanover who, after spending twenty years making cabinets, moved into the undertaking business, in which caskets, aside from their contents, must not have seemed to him much different from cabinets.
Adolph himself did not survive long, in the undertaking business or otherwise, having had an untimely death at the age of thirty in 1902, only eight years after founding his firm. His wife, Julia, took in a partner, Michael Dirnberger, to continue the business, which continued at 761 Seneca under the name of Dirnberger-Wedekindt until 1915, when it closed. Adolph’s memory, as that of his neighborhood business, goes on in photographs and in the funeral home of his great nephews, Richard and Raymond.
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