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Wlaf1450
By Charlie Hutson
LAFOLLETTE, TN (WLAF)- Back in 1935, C.W. Mars converted the house, in the photo above, into Mars Funeral Home. It would be Lafollette’s first funeral home that wasn’t in a downtown store front.
In early Lafollette, a lot of the funeral services/undertakers were located on the second floor of a downtown business.
In the early years, there were two funeral services/undertakers located on the second floor of the one time First National Bank at the corner of Central and Tennessee Avenues. Minton Sharp Funeral Home was located in a street level store front just a couple of doors up from FNB.
Usually back then, the undertaker prepared the deceased, and they would take the body to a church or home for the final service.
Mars Funeral home set in the middle of the 400 block of East Central Avenue. The house was destroyed by fire on October 13, 1967. In the 1990s, the location became David and Johnny Dunaway’s Law Office. (WLAF NEWS PUBLISHED-01/22/2026-6AM)
I look at this photo and can’t help but think about what was going on at that moment back at the base of the mountain in the lower left of the frame. Mom was a brand new baby. Papaw had just finished building the house they would share for the rest of their lives. My great-grandfather and great-grandmother lived nearly next door. They had emigtrated from Naples and Palermo respectively to New York City back in 1906 and 1901, married and moved to Rochester, then to La Follette and made it their home.
What were all these ancestors doing at the moment the photo was taken? Coooking? Cleaning? Tending grape vines? Tending the gardens? Tending the livestock? Fixing the car? Pushing an old fashioned mower whose blades spun with the wheels? Washing clothes in a tub? Heading out to work on building Norris Dam? Coulda been any number of things at that long gone moment of time when the photographer pushed the shutter button. Makes ya wonder…
THAT IS WHERE MY DAD STARTED OUT AT WHEN IT CHANGED TO MARS@ ROACH FUNERAL HOME