No casket, no cost: Tennesseans go back to ‘natural’ burial
WASHBURN, Tenn. (WVLT/Gray News) - An east Tennessee burial preserve goes back to the basics by offering a “simpler, more natural” way of burying the dead – no casket, no embalming and no cost.
In 2007, Bill Nickle, the founder of Narrow Ridge Center, a nonprofit organization established to teach sustainability, set aside five acres of land in Washburn for a natural burial preserve.
Five years later, Tennessee established Narrow Ridge as a community cemetery, and it has operated as such ever since. It's not like most cemeteries out there. It's a "green" cemetery, which its operators say means people buried there can't be embalmed or placed in a casket.
"When people died, they had home funerals and buried them within 26-36 hours and in a natural way," Bill Nickle told WVLT. "There was no embalming. There was no metal casket, no concrete vaults, and that was the way it was."