Written by The Bold Italic

On the same day Steven Welch got his driver’s license, he drove to pick up a body for his family’s funeral home, Duggan’s Funeral Service on 17th Street. He was 17.

More than 40 years later, he’s the mainstay of the multigenerational business. A lot has changed since those days; cremations outnumber direct burials nationwide, and people no longer want multi-day visitations, he says. Now, “they want it short and convenient.”

More than a dozen funeral homes lined Valencia Street for much of the 20th Century. Back then, funeral streetcars and a local railway ferried the dead and their mourners to cemeteries in Colma. Now, just two remain: Duggan’s Funeral Service, which moved from 1234 Valencia St. to 3434 17th St. in 1932, and Driscoll’s Valencia Street Serra Mortuary, near Cesar Chavez St.

With all the changes on Valencia in recent decades — restaurants, high-end shops, bike lanes, double-parked Ubers — Welch says that moving off of Valencia is one reason Duggan’s is still going.

“Where, on Valencia, would you put a hearse?” he asks, baffled.

Inside Duggan’s, the atmosphere is solemn and quiet; the traffic and bustle of Valencia Street seems miles away. Rooms are meticulously arranged for the next viewing or funeral, one chapel holds rows of empty pews and a podium where someone’s urn will be placed. Each chapel has doors to seal off the room, giving mourners space and privacy to grieve.

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San Francisco Chronicle

By Roland Li, Business ReporterUpdated

Death and taxes may be inevitable, but the business of death is changing.

Funeral homes that have been around for decades have been closing around San Francisco as sons and daughters of owners pursue other careers. Morticians are cashing out in the hot real estate market by selling their building sites for bigger housing developments.

Duggan’s Funeral Service is an exception. The family-owned, Mission District company celebrates its 100th anniversary on Saturday. It’s one of the oldest small businesses in the city.

Steven Welch, the fourth-generation manager of Duggan’s, said he’s constantly on the job, with clients who could call any time, any day.

“Somebody calls at 2 o’clock in the morning — you get up and go,” Welch said.

Duggan’s roots were historically in the Irish-Catholic community, which made up the bulk of its business. But since the 1960s, it’s grown to serve virtually all ethnicities and religions.

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Mission Local
by FRANCES SAUXSeptember 12, 2017, 6:27 am

Locked away in the basement safe at the Duggan Welch funeral home on 17th street are old record books, some dating back to the days when the mortuary carried out funeral processions by horse and carriage.

Steven Welch, the current owner, flipped through the pages. The earliest books are in his great-grandfather’s cursive. Later documents are in his grandmother’s handwriting and then his father’s and, finally, his own.

After nearly 100 years in business — its centennial anniversary is officially next year — Duggan Welch Mortuary remains one of longest-enduring mortuaries on what once used to be a corridor of funeral homes.

The records are a kind of family history, as well as a story of a changing San Francisco. Discharged from the military in 1900, Welch’s great-grandfather, William Duggan, found a regular gig driving a horse and carriage in San Francisco for Henrietta Hagan, the daughter of a funeral-parlor owner on Valencia Street.

Duggan and Hagan eventually married, and Duggan entered Hagan’s family trade, opening his own funeral home in 1918 at 1234 Valencia St., now Yoga Tree. Over the next couple of decades, the street would become a corridor for preparing the dead.

A trolley ran down Valencia all the way to Daly City to transport funeral processions to cemeteries outside the city. The train cars had special compartments for placing caskets and flowers, making Valencia an ideal location for a mortuary.

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Vaughn Nixon, is the funeral director at Duggan’s Funeral Service in the Mission. He has been a licensed embalmer for more than 40 years. Nixon learned the craft from his family, which runs a funeral home in his native Grenada. “I started helping out early, around 8 or 9 years old,” Nixon says. “We helped with dusting, sweeping and mopping as needed. We kids made the caskets with whatever wood we could find.”

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