About the Luginbuel Family

The Luginbuel family has been in the funeral services business for more than a hundred years — from a mercantile counter in Dutch Mills in the 1890s through four generations of service in West Washington County today.

The Early Years

It began with Charles Noble Luginbuel, who worked in a mercantile store in Dutch Mills, Arkansas. Among the items the store sold were caskets, which his sons delivered to families across the county. That simple, quiet work planted the seed of everything that followed.

In 1924, two of Charles's sons, Loyd and Reid, opened the Luginbuel Funeral Home in Lincoln, Arkansas. Not long after, Reid moved west with another brother, Jeff, and established a funeral home in Vinita, Oklahoma. Reid's son, Jack, still owns that location today — along with facilities in Grove, Jay, Langley, Nowata, and Bartlesville — a parallel Luginbuel tradition a state away.

Lincoln and the First Home

Back in Lincoln, Loyd built the area's first motorized funeral vehicle by fitting a horse-drawn hearse body onto the back of a Ford Model T pickup. In 1925, he purchased a building that had been the South Methodist Church in Lincoln and had it moved one block south to the location where the funeral home has stood ever since.

A small piece of local lore attaches to that move: in the fall of 1924, Elsie Graves' grandmother, Frances Jennings Roller, passed away while the old church sat up on jacks, ready to be relocated. Rather than delay, the family held her funeral in the church as it waited to move. Not long after, the building rolled down the block and was remodeled into the funeral home.

Loyd married Edna Rankin in 1929. Edna graduated from the University of Arkansas and taught school in the Siloam Springs and Lincoln areas. After their marriage she attended Mortuary College in Kansas City and became a licensed embalmer and funeral director in both Arkansas and Oklahoma. She held the title of "Oldest Lady Funeral Director" in Arkansas until her death in 1990.

Growing the Family Business

In 1937, the Luginbuels opened a second location in Prairie Grove, occupying the F. H. Carl home on East Buchanan Street. (That building has since been removed.) In 1942, they purchased the Southern Funeral Home — then operating out of the Southern Mercantile Store on Buchanan Street — and merged it into the Prairie Grove practice while continuing to run the Lincoln home.

Later that same year they bought the old Marrs Hotel building on North Neal and remodeled it into a funeral home on the first floor with apartments upstairs. Over time they expanded it to include a chapel, waiting room, offices, and viewing rooms. That building is the heart of the business today.

Funeral practice in the rural 1940s looked little like it does now. Most embalming was done in the family's home, on a wooden table called a cooling board. After embalming, the Luginbuels would leave the body with the family and return to the funeral home; the family would come in to select a casket; the Luginbuels would then go back to the home to dress the body; and the viewing would take place there, in the parlor.

The Next Generation

Loyd and Edna had two children, Loyd Wayne and Janice. Loyd Wayne was drawn to the business from the time he was four or five years old, watching his parents work in the preparation room. By his teens he was taking part in everything — most memorably, the ambulance service. He was driving the ambulance at age twelve or thirteen and continued driving it to school through high school, leaving class on average about once a month to make calls.

One story he still tells: his first-period math teacher was furious the morning he showed up late after an early call. All he could do was apologize. The very next day, she broke her leg in a car wreck on her way to school — and he was the one who picked her up in the ambulance.

In 1958, his father suffered a heart attack, and Loyd Wayne — sixteen at the time — stepped further into the business. By 1961 he had fully assumed management of both the funeral home and the ambulance service. The ambulance service ran until the mid-1970s. The Lincoln location closed around 1993, and all operations consolidated at the Prairie Grove home. Loyd died in March of 1992.

Janice married William "Bill" Hibbard in 1957. They had two children, Keri Ann Hibbard and William Robert Hibbard. Bill passed away in 1988. Janice spent her career as a schoolteacher in the North Little Rock School System and has since retired.

The Fourth Generation

Loyd Wayne married Sharon Morris of Lincoln in 1963. They had two children, Stacy Wayne Luginbuel and Amy Renee Luginbuel.

Stacy completed mortuary school in 1988 and works alongside his father in the funeral home — the fourth generation of Luginbuels carrying on what Charles Noble's sons began with caskets from a mercantile. He married Chere Bessinger in 1993; they have two sons, Reid James Luginbuel and Garrett Wayne Luginbuel.

Amy married Ashley White in 1996. They have two children, Alexis Ann White and Charles Jackson Luginbuel White.

A century of service, four generations, one Arkansas community — that we've been honored to walk alongside through their most difficult moments, and that we intend to keep walking alongside for as long as the family name is on the sign.