The Coolest Throwback Columbarium Ever
Originally Posted on The Register Guard
Want to spend eternity in a counterculture symbol of the 1960s? Mark and Jeff Musgrove have a final resting place for you.
Musgrove Family Mortuaries has restored a Volkswagen bus and converted it to a columbarium for cremated remains.
“This is iconic,” Mark Musgrove said on Friday. “This is Eugene.”
For $995, a person can have an urn with their ashes permanently placed inside the colorfully decorated vehicle at Musgrove-owned Lane Memorial Gardens, off West 11th Avenue.
The back window of the bus will be opened during commital ceremonies. Ash-filled urns will be placed on a fabric covered platform with a tie-dyed painted peace symbol hanging on a purple backdrop.
After the ceremony, urns will be placed inside the passenger compartment of the bus and locked. The bus will hold about 100 urns.
Cremated remains have been inurned in unusual places, including in a reef along the Florida coast, or in satellites orbiting the Earth, the Musgrove brothers said.
Musgrove Mortuaries & Cemeteries owns cemeteries in Eugene and Springfield, and funeral homes in Eugene, Springfield, Creswell and Junction City.
The Musgrove’s West Lawn Memorial Park on South Danbeo Avenue has an outdoor area under tall Douglas fir trees called “Whispering Waters” that is reserved for inurnment of cremated remains.
But the idea of making a columbarium out of an old VW bus arose last year when the brothers were talking about their business, and how fewer people are buying burial plots or reserving permanent spaces in “urn gardens.”
Conventional resting places seem to be falling out of favor in Eugene, especially among people who “don’t see value in a more traditional kind of way,” Mark Musgrove said.
“People are scattering remains or keeping them at home,” Jeff Musgrove said. “They have intentions to scatter ashes, but they never get around to it.
“It’s too bad that we couldn’t (inurn ashes) at Kesey Square,” he recalled saying to his brother last year.
“And then Mark said, ‘Why don’t we get a VW van and paint it up and have it here? This cemetery is on the way to Country Fair.’ ”
The Musgroves asked company mechanic Cody Rushing to find an old Volkswagen bus that could be made into a columbarium.
He found a 1972 bus rusting in a farm field in southern Washington. While it was in poor condition, “we pretty much stole it for $1,100,” Rushing said. “These are difficult to find.”
He spent as much time as he could over six months restoring the bus, including finding missing mirrors and other parts, replacing broken windows and doing body work.
The Musgroves collaborated with John Chapman and an artist at Sign Pro to develop the colorful art, including flowers and peace symbols, which cover most of the bus in a vinyl wrap. The word peace is displayed on one side and the word love on the other.
The engineless bus is parked on a concrete pad under a metal roof supported by six Douglas fir posts. The vehicle is anchored to the concrete pad to prevent theft.
Plaques with the names, and birth and death dates of the inurned in the bus will be attached to the wood posts.
The Musgroves estimate they spent “tens of thousands of dollars” to find and restore the bus, and to build the concrete pad and roof.
They call the area the “Peace Garden.”
The public is invited to an unveiling of the bus at Lane Memorial Gardens at 1 p.m. Wednesday.
Solar panels attached to the roof will charge the battery that powers lights on the bus, including the headlights that will be illuminated during the day and night.
The bus is set back away from West 11th Avenue, with its front facing the busy street.
“The lights will be on fairly dim,” Rushing said. “We didn’t want the headlights shining out to the road. At night, it will look like a car with a battery going dead.”
“Like a typical Volkswagen,” Mark Musgrove said.
