Business rises from the graves

ROCKY MOUNT -- If your eternal rest in our local soil is disturbed someday, chances are good that a fellow named R. Ward Sutton had something to do with it. Sutton will flat dig you up. It won't matter how long you've been down there, how comfortable you've gotten or even how thoroughly you've embraced that whole ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust thing. Once he gets the word, you're coming out of the ground. Resistance is futile.

If you wanted to give Sutton a highfalutin title, try this one: "grave relocation facilitator." He's the guy you call when grandma, bless her heart, needs to be moved out of the way of whatever she's in the way of. But one of Sutton's acquaintances has a better title for him. He calls Sutton a "reverse funeral director."

Most funeral directors are in charge of putting you in the ground. Sutton's responsible for pulling you out.

If you're one of his customers, you can take comfort in numbers. Sutton has dug up thousands of graves in his 46-year career, and lately most of them have been in the Triangle. If there's a holding pen for displaced souls, you'll have lots of company. Plus, you'll meet some really interesting people. Everyone from Revolutionary War-era planters to antebellum slaves.

There are two main reasons for the success of Cemetery Services, Sutton's Rocky Mount-based firm. The first is that his only true competitor retired, then died, a few years ago. A field that wasn't very crowded to start with became Sutton's alone to claim.

The second reason is that relocation of graves is a bureaucratically cumbersome exercise, requiring lots of documentation and endless interaction with various bodies of government. Sutton has conquered a complicated process through patience and organization.

But those two things -- a virtual monopoly and a gift for paperwork -- only partly explain his success. A third reason has to do with your desire to have a grocery store and bank branch close by. Or your wish to trade up to a new home. Maybe it's all those things combined: a job brought you here, and you're in the market for a new home with shopping conveniently nearby.

Whatever the case, the Triangle's growth has made Sutton a busy man. Because when a grave gets in the way of growth, the grave usually loses.

The go-to guy

In 1960, Sutton started in the grave trade as a mortuary apprentice at a Greenville funeral home. "I did a little bit of it all," he says. "The apprentice had all the odd jobs."

Among those was washing the hearses, which had to be kept spotless because one of the funeral industry's rock-solid precepts is that nobody should ever be hauled to the Great Beyond in a dusty vehicle. Much less often, Sutton was recruited to help with an occasional grave relocation. It was an era when rural family cemeteries -- until then often the default choice for burials -- were starting to give way to memorial gardens, and sometimes the ancestors were moved to those new grounds to help keep the freshly dead company.

"It fascinated me," Sutton says. "I'd rather go out and move a grave than wash a car."

Sutton volunteered for relocation duty as often as possible, and in 1980 he decided to fly solo. He put together a crew and created Cemetery Services specifically to perform disinterments. At the time, there wasn't exactly a huge demand for Sutton's specialty -- the state's growth boom still being a few years away -- but there wasn't much competition, either.

"Most funeral directors aren't gonna get dirty," he says.

As the years unfolded, Sutton's reputation as the go-to guy for grave relocations grew. Although most of his work has been in the Carolinas, he has been hired for jobs in states as far away as Florida and Texas.