It’s an uncomfortable reality.

As Lawrence’s population grows, so does business for the city’s funeral homes.

Donna Mathena-Menke, funeral director of Lawrence Funeral Chapel, says that Lawrence is a growing market and jumped at the chance to open a new funeral home.

For nearly a century, Warren-McElwain Mortuary and Rumsey-Yost Funeral Home have been just about the only players in town. But a third funeral home set up shop this winter in West Lawrence.

Eager to enter an expanding market, Lawrence Funeral Chapel opened Jan. 25 at the southeast corner of Sixth Street and Wakarusa Drive. Donna Mathena-Menke, funeral director, partnered with Chris Hutton, owner of Lawrence Hutton Monuments, to open the new funeral home.

The monument business was relocated into the new building.

Mathena-Menke said that with about 600 funerals a year in Lawrence, the city certainly had room for a third funeral home.

“Two funeral homes in a town this large is almost unheard of,” she said. “In Topeka, we had 120,000 people and eight funeral homes.”

She said the funeral home she ran for 20 years with her ex-husband in Topeka handled about 230 funerals annually.

“We were pretty much maxed out,” she said. “For those two funeral homes to handle this kind of load, I don’t know how they do it.”

The veterans

Officials at the city’s two pioneer funeral homes say they’ve had no problem handling from 290 to 325 funerals each a year.

“We can handle more than that here,” said Larry McElwain, co-owner and funeral director at Warren-McElwain.

The owner of Rumsey-Yost Funeral Home agreed.

“We have never been overworked, so to speak, or not been able to handle the business that’s been in the community,” Al Yost said.

Rumsey-Yost began in 1920 under the direction of Charlie Rumsey. It was a block south of its current building at 601 Ind., where it moved in 1929.

About a year and a half ago, the funeral home remodeled, moving its business offices upstairs and opening its ground floor to accommodate more people.

Three years ago, Rumsey-Yost added a crematory the only one in Douglas County, Yost said.

The funeral home has no immediate plans for future expansion.

“We’re just doing each day the best we can, helping people as we’ve always done,” Yost said. “We’ll just continue to do that.”

Returning to Eudora

Warren-McElwain traces its beginnings back to 1904, when Carl Schubert ran Schubert Funeral Home out of a building it shared with a barber shop in Eudora. Five years later, T.D. Funk opened Funk Mortuary in Lawrence. The two came together in 1953 to form Cooper-Warren Mortuary, which changed to Warren Mortuary in 1967, and then Warren-McElwain in 1974.

The mortuary has been operating since 1971 out of its facility at 120 W. 13th St. Although it’s been redecorated a number of times, McElwain said, the mortuary has not expanded.

But in mid-March, Warren-McElwain broke ground on what will be a 5,500-square-foot facility in Eudora, a town that doesn’t currently have a funeral home.

“We started in Eudora, and we’re going back there 98 years later,” McElwain said. “Mainly because of the growth of Johnson County west and Lawrence going east, we feel it’s best to establish ourselves at the growth points.”

The new facility will serve eastern Lawrence, Eudora and western Johnson County.

For about a decade, Warren-McElwain also has owned land on Wakarusa Drive, where it plans to expand eventually.

“The time’s not here yet,” McElwain said. “A new west facility would create more expense but not any additional business.”

Different demographics

As Lawrence’s population has increased during the past decade, the city’s younger residents have kept the death rate at the second-lowest level in the state, according to the Kansas Office of Vital Statistics.

The median age of Lawrence residents is 25.3 years, more than a decade younger than residents of Topeka (36.3) or all of Kansas (35.2), according to the U.S. Census. Lawrence has an annual death rate of 4.9 residents per thousand, compared with a state average of 9.2 deaths per thousand.

But that trend could begin to change. Mathena-Menke said she’s noticed that a lot of the new growth in Lawrence is being spurred by retired people moving here to live in a college town.

“We’re going to see a lot more influx of older people,” she said.

She said Lawrence Funeral Chapel would start small, with a first-year goal of conducting from 30 to 35 funerals.

She said the funeral homes she used to compete against in Topeka always worked well together in a pinch, sometimes sending over extra cars to cover last-minute shortages. She hopes the same spirit of cooperation will happen in Lawrence.

“They’ve had a corner on the market for a lot of years,” she said of Warren-McElwain and Rumsey-Yost. “I’m sure it’s not comfortable to see someone else come in.”

But both McElwain and Yost said they are ready to work with the new kid on the block.

“They do what we do,” McElwain said. “The days of fierce rivalry are over with. It spills over into what we do.”