Alfred Douglas Price was born into slavery on April 21, 1860 near Ashland, Virginia in Hanover County. Price attended the first public school in the country established for colored people.

He became a blacksmith apprentice and set up his own shop in 1879 in Richmond, Virginia. This business grew rapidly and he found it necessary to constantly add to his facilities. In his shops he employed both white and colored mechanics and helpers, numbering in all twelve men and boys. Price also decided to take a chance on a budding new field and opened a brokerage company in 1880 in Richmond.

In the 1860’s, embalming was a fairly new practice in the United States, although it had been a common practice in Europe for years. The Civil War era brought about much change; and , in response to an outpouring of letters from the mothers of Union soldiers, President Lincoln ordered deceased soldiers’ bodies o be embalmed so they could be sent back to their families for some type of grief and memorial closure. President Lincoln’s own body was embalmed, the first President Lincoln’s own body was embalmed, the first President to undergo this post mortem procedure.

A young A.D. Price, who was light complexioned enough to pass for a white man, enrolled in all-white embalming school. Price gained his certification with just a one-week course taught by William Jackson Bunnell (one of the leading Civil War embalming surgeons – he embalmed Union Soldiers from the Gettysburg, PA and City Point, VA conflicts and was the brother-in-law to Thomas Holmes, the father of the North American Embalming and Funeral Service Practices). The course covered the insight of embalming practices which included preservative treatments of arterially injected and surface embalming. After returning, he added undertaking to his list of businesses on February 2, 1881, thus, the birth of The A.D. Price Funeral Establishment, Richmond, VA.

Price married at age 34 on September 12, 1894 in Washington, D.C., to Georgia A. Gibbons, one of the original Fisk University Jubilee Singers (one child was born to this union, Alfred Douglas Price, Jr., born August 8, 1900), whose father was a well known Minister/Pastor, Reverend William A. Gibbons of Washington, D.C. A dynamic force and zeal, he became nationally famous as an orator and leader. He left his own wedding reception early in order o rush back to Richmond to oppose a state law aimed at excluding coloreds from the funeral profession. Virginia passed the first funeral service regulatory bill in the United States, in 1894. He made an impassioned speech to the General Assembly, which at that time consisted of eight colored members of the House of Delegates (The Honorable Alfred W. Harris (Dinwiddie County), The Honorable William W. Evans (Petersburg), The Honorable Caesar Perkins (Buckingham County), The Honorable John H. Robinson (Elizabeth City County), The Honorable Goodman Brown (Surry County), The Honorable Nathaniel M. Griggs (Prince Edward County), The William H. Ash (Nottoway County), and The Honorable Briton Baskerville, Jr. (Mecklenburg County). The General Assembly ratified the measure anyway. The new law required all funeral directors to pass an embalming class from which coloreds were excluded.

Price, who had taken the class years before under the guise of a white man, was among only a handful of colored funeral directors allowed to remain open. He erected a  three-story building at 212 East Leigh Street, March 7, 1883 (the same structure in which we are located today), where he conducted business as undertaker, embalmer and liveryman, with perhaps one of the largest outfits in the whole south: consisting in part of twenty-five first-class rubber-tired carriages, four late style funeral cars, two massive undertaking wagons, (one of which was the finest in the State), two  latest style undertaking buggies, pleasure wagons, omnibuses and vehicles of nearly every kind usual for a first-class up-to-date livery business. His real estate holdings alone were estimated at $65,000.00. In addition to property at 210 and 212 East Leigh Street, he owned a large brick warehouse where he carried a large stock of undertaker’s supplies and sold to other businesses throughout Virginia, the Carolinas and as far as Georgia.

From early childhood, he was active in Sunday school work. For several years he was Superintendent of an afternoon Sunday school near his childhood home in Ashland, and later a teacher in the Ebenezer Baptist Church Sunday School in Richmond, Virginia.

He was eminently successful, energetic, broad gauged and public-spirited. He was congenial, pleasant and easy to approach. He served as President of The Southern Aid Society of Virginia, Inc., and Director of the Mechanics Savings Bank, Capital Shoe and Supply Company, Richmond Hospital, American Beneficial Insurance Company and was connected with many other enterprises.

Price, Sr. died in April 9, 1921 and eventually his son, A.D. Price, Jr. succeeded him until his death on March 23, 1975. On March 7, 2008 Carl U. Eggleston, became involved with the business and take pride in continuing its legacy as the oldest African-American business in the City of Richmond and one of the ten oldest African-American businesses in the United States of America, with a devoted staff of Funeral Service professionals to assist you and yours.