Founded in 1838, the James Cunningham & Sons Company of Rochester, N.Y., was renowned for its elegant and expensive horse-drawn carriages - landaus, berlines and broughams. But the company was also one of America's premier builders of high-grade hearses, pallbearer coaches, casket wagons and ambulances. Cunningham vehicles were consistently awarded gold medals for blue-ribbon quality at numerous industrial exhibitions.
In 1893, at a cost of $12,000, Cunningham designed and built this ornate horse-drawn hearse for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The one-of-a-kind funeral vehicle featured unique rectangular glass towers at each corner, each capped with an acorn-shaped cupola; swelled plate glass side windows, and a large domed ornament in the center of the roof. Following the Chicago exhibition, this magnificent hearse was sold to prominent Detroit undertaker P. Blake & Son, which had its funeral parlors in the 1885 Blake Building at Abbott and First Streets in downtown Detroit. The imposing Cunningham horse-drawn hearse remained in service until 1915.
Cunningham began building carriage-trade automobiles in 1908. In 1909, the company introduced the first complete factory-built motor ambulance in the U.S. A victim of the Depression that all but obliterated the custom-body luxury car business, Cunningham ceased vehicle production in 1936, just two years shy of its centennial. But the Cunningham name continued for many more years as a maker of precision electronic switching equipment.
