Ward's Funeral Home is an abandoned funeral home from the early 1900s in Opelika City, Alabama. The funeral house, one of the city's first, was abandoned after the Great Depression and left to rot in despair.

Curing Opelika city

Ward's Funeral Home was built in 1870 on Avenue A in Opelika and eventually became the home of African American physician Dr. Eugene Anthony Lindsey and his wife Clara Brown Lindsey. Lindsey was born in LaGrange, Georgia in 1882 and moved to Alabama in 1923, where he was given the address 207 Avenue A. He and his wife relocated to Opelika in the 1920s and founded Lindsey's Drugstore and Soda Fountain on 9th Street in downtown Opelika, one of the few locations where black people could lounge and chat while waiting for prescriptions to be filled.

The drugstore later changed owners and remained in business until the late 1950s. It is uncertain when the Ward family bought the ancient house. K. C. Ward and Christine Ward, on the other hand, created Ward's Funeral Home in 1953. K. C. Ward also worked for the White Angel Insurance Company. Christine attended Selma University and received a Bachelor of Science in Elementary Education from Alabama State University before starting her teaching career in the Lee County School District. She also belonged to the Alabama Funeral Directors and Morticians Association.

Effects of the Great Depression

The corporation fared well until the Great Depression when it struggled to recover. As the firm battled to regain its footing, additional well-built and planned funeral homes cropped up, making recovery harder. Maurice Ward had two funeral homes to operate during the Great Depression, and it needed an outrageously big amount of money to stable all of them. Making enough profit to stabilize all of the residences would be unfeasible because they were all already losing money. Maurice took the painful choice to close the funeral home, which left him with only one problem to deal with.

Ward’s Funeral Home Today

The Opelika location was no longer used as a funeral home in 1989. Issues of demolition have been raised three times to the city council since 2011, as the building has deteriorated to the point of posing a hazard to the neighborhood. Maurice Ward, the property's owner and the son of K.C. and Christine Ward, was allowed more time to arrange money and commence renovations. The structure was demolished on November 13, 2019, after the city filed a demolition order in October 2019. Maurice Ward, who lives in Valley, Alabama, continues to oversee the family's funeral home. There isn't much to see in town save for a few concrete remnants that the demolition firm couldn't find a location to dispose of.