Paul Simms, manager of the Butler County Memorial Park and Mausoleum, has seen many trends come and go since he got into the funeral business in 1987, but what recently has caught his attention is the increase in demand for cremations in the county.

“When you've been in the business this long you see trends,” Simms said. “I know the current cremation rate in Butler County from what I can tell is roughly just below 50%.”

“It's been a very gradual increase,” he added. “It hasn't been all of the sudden. Back in the ’80s when I started the cremation rate was probably 15%.”

The trend toward the use of cremation has impacted services offered by those in the funeral industry such as Pat Boylan Sr. of Boylan Funeral Homes and Chris Hile, who owns Hile Funeral Homes and Donegal Monument Co.

Simms said that on the high end, his customers are willing to pay upward of $25,000 on a cremation funeral, which includes a typical viewing on multiple days, followed by the cremation, but there are less expensive choices, too.

Urns themselves can cost about $5,000 on the high end, Simms said, but there are selections as low as $200.

“Cremation does open a lot of options for you,” Simms said. “Say you have a death in the family, the next three to four days are going to be busy taking care of the situation. When it comes to cremation, you may have family all over the place and you can decide to have the funeral at a later time.”

“We do get kind of busy around the holidays when people come back into town. The death could have even happened a couple months or even years ago.”

In today’s economic times, the average person might think the increased use of cremations would be to reduce costs, but Simms said that is not always the case.

“It’s done either for religious reasons or traditional reasons,” Simms said. “I have served many families that have lots of money who choose cremation because that’s the route that they prefer.”

“People will spend an exorbitant amount of money before the cremation occurs,” he added. “I think the perception is cremation is super quick, no viewing, no anything and that’s just not the case at all.”

However, Chris Hile, owner of Donegal Monument Co. and Hile Funeral Homes in Chicora, explained that, in his experience, expense is one of the reasons people are turning towards cremation, although families are also looking for simplification.

“It seems that folks want a more simplified funeral than they did maybe 20 years ago,” Hile said. “COVID also changed things, I believe, and people are wanting private services with just their family.”

Hillview Cemetery in the village of Kepple’s Corners near Chicora recently installed a granite columbarium in June, which was purchased by the cemetery from Hile’s Donegal Monument Co.

Columbariums house urns and cremains that are taken from the crematory and placed in a granite structure with small separated pieces called niches that house the cremation urns, Hile explained.

“The columbarium is nice because opposed to scattering the remains, you have a place to go visit,” Hile said. “I think there was a need in the Chicora area for something like this. It’s still a dignified place to place the loved ones and (can) be a place that you can go on special occasions."

Hile said that columbariums are usually a granite structure that houses the urns in a niche behind a sealed granite door.

His columbarium holds 40 niches with 30 “singles” and 10 “doubles.”

“The singles will house up to two urns and the others can house up to four,” Hile said.

The Butler County Memorial Park and Mausoleum offers both in ground and above ground options for placing loved ones that have been cremated.

“When it comes to in ground, every cemetery is different,” Simms said. “We allow up to two cremations in one grave. (It’s) still a full-sized grave. It’s really hard to make the graves when you have more than two people in them. We only use the flat stones.”

While above ground options come in the form of columbariums, it also has a mausoleum that houses niches.

“The other option is we have these glass niches,” Simms said. “It’s unique because urns are mandatory for that. We require bronze urns, and we engrave the names and dates on the urns themselves. They are placed behind a glass plate. Your urn essentially becomes your tombstone with a light that is on 24-7.”

Any cemetery salesperson working in a large for-profit cemetery like Butler County Memorial Park and Mausoleum must be licensed by the state, Simms explained.

With this comes “trusting rules,” which makes the operation set aside money from each sale for the future maintenance of the cemetery.

“Every time somebody purchases property at the cemetery, we take 15% of that purchase price and trust that with a bank locally, and that money goes in there and never comes out,” Simms said. “With the idea being when the cemetery is completely filled up that there will be enough money in that trust fund that the interest alone would be used to maintain the cemetery.”

Boylan, president of Boylan Funeral Home, said his staff performs about 10 cremations a week at their Renfrew location, with most including some type of service.

“We have a basic cremation price and our bottom line is the direct disposal,” Boylan said. “A direct cremation is when we remove the body from the place of death, bring it to the funeral home, make the arrangements and do the cremation and nothing else. Anything in addition to that adds to the cost.”

Boylan mentioned he likes having his own crematory on site because it reduces liability.

“We can control our own destiny,” Boylan said. “They won't have to worry about the body being transported from different places before the cremation takes place. Most funeral homes do not have crematories.”

Proposed legislation, supported by local operators and state Rep. Marcie Mustello, R-11th, may change the way crematoriums operate.

The current recommended temperature for a modern crematory to operate efficiently and successfully is between 1,400 degrees and 1,800 degrees, and in Pennsylvania any crematory placed into operation after April 17, 1989, is required to use a temperature of 1,800 degrees, according state regulations.

However, state House Bill 1464, which currently sits on the house floor, aims to lower the the minimum operating temperature of crematoriums to 1,600 degrees.

“The actual part of that crematory is called a retort,” Simms said. “They have become super high efficiency. Right now 1,800 degrees is almost insane because the higher you keep those temperatures, you have to rebuild those retorts, and they use special bricks inside of them. Plus you are using more energy. Pretty much 99% of retorts use natural gas."