The venerable Teeters' Furniture and Teeters' Funeral Chapel in Hawley, two separate but adjacent businesses run by the Teeter family, marked 175 years of continuous business in 2024. These fifth-generation family businesses have remained in the same area of downtown Hawley.

In celebration, the Teeters have had year-long discount offers at their store. In September, their state legislators, Sen. Lisa Baker and Rep. Jeff Olsommer, brought certificates of recognition and were given a tour, said Richard "Dick" Alvin Teeter, fourth-generation owner.

They started in 1849, when Zachary Taylor was president of the United States. While easterners headed west that year for the California gold rush, Richard Adam Teeter headed east from St. Louis for the Hawley "Canal Rush," said his great-grandson, Dick.

Hawley was in the midst of a boom time. The hamlet, centered on its mills powered by the cascading Paupack Falls, was growing quickly with the mid-19th century expansion of the Delaware & Hudson Canal. The canal, which was connected with a gravity railroad at Honesdale bringing coal to the waiting canal boats, was about to be served by a second gravity system at Hawley.

Operated by the Pennsylvania Coal Company, the company brought in hundreds of immigrant laborers and their families, and laid out a larger town, selling off lots. A new Main Street was formed for Hawley's principal commercial district, eventually eclipsing the business district on Hudson Street alongside the canal and the newly dug canal basin, what is now Bingham Park.

Providing funerals and furniture is not all that strange a combination.

The historic link, Teeter said, was the need in the old days to manufacture caskets. These were sold along with the tables and chairs of the living, when household necessities had to be made as well as acquired locally.

Born in 1827 in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, the founding father of the business, Richard Adam Teeter, moved to Wisconsin and Missouri in his early teens. He learned undertaking in St. Louis during plagues of black diphtheria, black smallpox and cholera. At age 20 he returned east, and at 22, in 1849, settled in Hawley. Here, he set up shop making cabinets and caskets and did undertaking.

His son, Richard Teeter (no middle name), was the next owner. After he died in 1918, his son George Teeter (Dick's uncle) ran the business until 1941, when Dick's father Richard A. Teeter (he only had a middle initial), who had worked there since 1924, took the reins.

In 1924, George Teeter and his nephew Richard A. Teeter were contracted by Pennsylvania Realty & Investment Company for PP&L, to relocate the Purdytown Cemetery. The graveyard was about to be flooded by the creation of Lake Wallenpaupack. Contracted to move 20 bodies and grave markers at $20 a grave, there were actually 54. They were moved a short distance to higher ground, in Paupack Township. Wallenpaupack Historical Society was granted ownership and care of the cemetery in 2010.

Richard A. Teeter and his wife Helen managed the businesses until his death in 1970. He was known as the "whistling undertaker." Their son Dick began working there in 1963 and bought the business two years later. Dick Teeter's brother J. Kimble Teeter was active in both businesses from 1964 until retiring in 2008.

Dick and Mary Anne Teeter raised three daughters: Mary Helen Schmalzle, Jennifer Peifer and Julie Teeter-Seiler. They have seven grandchildren.

Teeter-Seiler obtained her funeral license in 2015. Dick said that he turned over both the furniture and funeral businesses to her "about eight years ago" although he remains actively involved.

The store built by Richard Adam Teeter in 1849-1850 was expanded over the years with three sections. The original building was a cabinet shop set back from the street; second came the store on the corner, with rental storefronts on the ground floor, and third was an addition, with three stories. Over the years, there were numerous business tenants. Hawley Post Office was located here between 1897 and 1905.

The store was converted to completely furniture sales in the mid-1940s.

Until 1928, the funerals were conducted in private residences (if not in churches), with arrangements by Teeters’. In 1928, the brick funeral chapel was built on Church Street, between the corner store and the Teeter residence. This was the first building constructed in northeast Pennsylvania exclusively for funerals, Dick said. The building was designed with a church motif, with Gothic-style windows.

Dick and Mary Anne Teeter lived at the Teeter homestead until 1977, when it became an extension of the chapel, known as the East Chapel.

In September 1986, fire wrecked the furniture store on Main Avenue, as well as the original 1849 workshop in back. The funeral chapels survived. The furniture store was completely rebuilt and reopened in nine months.

Practically every year, the public gets to enjoy a treasured artifact of the Teeter legacy, when their horse-drawn hearse is included in a town parade. Built around 1870, the hearse was refurbished in 1977 for the Hawley Sesquicentennial Parade.

Dick’s father operated a hearse that doubled as an ambulance. In this case the undertaker just "switched hats," so to speak. No medical training came with it; the patient was just picked up and given a ride.

Today they have five full-time employees, working in both businesses, and one part-time employee working only on the funeral side.

They don’t make their own furniture or caskets anymore, but the ambitions of their forefather Richard Adam Teeter continues to this day, a stellar example of small-town family entrepreneurship.