Gregory W. Spencer Funeral Directors

A welcoming Fort Worth funeral home

Though some things have changed in our nearly 40 years in business, one thing has not: Gregory W. Spencer Funeral Directors prioritizes personal attention. With an understanding of the special care that families need after losing a loved one, our funeral directors offer unparalleled professional guidance and honor loved ones with dignity and respect.

Located on Miller Avenue in southeast Fort Worth, our red brick building is a comfortable place to plan a funeral or cremation. The recently remodeled chapel seats 200 guests and includes an organ, a modern sound system and monitors for a multimedia presentation. We can decorate the room any way you choose, turning the space into a nightclub or a barbershop, displaying a cherished hat collection or an artist’s watercolors. Start with a story, we’ll design something truly special from there.

Should you and your guests wish to linger after a service, a small hospitality room provides a place for coffee, tea and fellowship.

Cremation services

We specialize in cremation services that honor loved ones in personalized ways, and families love our transparent pricing. With expertise in scattering ashes and a friendly team who pays attention to every detail, we provide service that is second to none.

More and more people are choosing cremation over traditional burial, but most aren’t familiar with the many options:

• a cremation without a funeral or memorial service of any kind.
• a funeral with your loved one present, followed by cremation.
• a cremation followed by a scattering, cemetery memorialization or celebration of life—or all three.

For those who wish for a more momentous memorial, Neptune Memorial Reef is an underwater cremation garden off the coast of Florida. A Celestis Memorial Spaceflight takes ashes into space for a little while or forever.

There are many options for cremation—and they're not all equal. Here's what you can expect when you choose us for your loved one's cremation:

• Custody of care guaranteed. Our custody-of-care program helps safeguard the identification of your loved one from the time we bring them into our care until the time we return them to your family. We check, cross-check and check again, every step of the way.
• Exclusive custody of your loved one. We use only crematories owned and operated by Dignity Memorial^® providers or trusted partners. Once your loved one is in our custody or that of a trusted partner, they’re in our care until they’re returned to your family.
• Licensed, certified, conscientious staff. All Dignity Memorial crematory operators are licensed and certified by Cremation Association of North America, or CANA. Only one person at a time is cremated, and the cremation chamber is thoroughly cleaned before the next person is cremated.

Read more about our cremation services.

Planning a funeral ahead of time allows you to make clear-headed, stress-free decisions about the kind of service you’d like. When you pre-plan your funeral, you select the things that will tell your story best and relieve your family of the emotional and financial burden of planning for you. You also lock in today’s prices—something that inevitably saves money. Pre-planning discussions can sometimes be awkward, but we can help with hard conversations. A dedicated team member knows just how to explain your options and support you the whole way through.

Let us guide you

We pride ourselves on taking care of the details, and the passion we feel for our longstanding role in the area is evident in our work. Our founder was a beloved part of the Fort Worth community, and many of our team members have worked at the funeral home for more than 30 years. We are your friends and neighbors—and we always treat you that way.

At Gregory W. Spencer Funeral Directors, a member of our team is always available to take your call right away, day or night, and we welcome you to tour the funeral home. Please don’t hesitate to reach out, whether you are planning ahead or have an immediate need.

History

Funeral service was Gregory Wayne Spencer’s passion from a very young age. Relatives say he preached in his backyard and held funerals for birds, frogs and pets in his neighborhood. At the age of 9, he began attending funeral services at Baker Funeral Home, where he later worked washing funeral cars and as an usher.

A smart young man, Gregory graduated a year early from Green B. Trimble Technical High School and then petitioned the Texas Funeral Service Commission for permission to attend the Dallas Institute of Mortuary Science at age 17 (the required age at the time was 21). When he obtained his funeral director’s license two years later in 1975, he was the youngest funeral director in Texas. In 1978, he became an ordained minister and later founded The Church at Philadelphia in Fort Worth.

Gregory opened Gregory W. Spencer Funeral Directors in 1980. By the mid-1990s, his namesake funeral home handled about half of the funerals for Fort Worth’s black community—about 550 deaths a year—and Gregory attended every one. He earned a reputation as an innovator, a showman, and a tireless poet and composer.

At one time, the funeral home had two other locations. Gregory W. Spencer & Sons Funeral Directors at the McGowan Mansion and Gregory W. Spencer & Sons Funeral Directors at Cedar Crest, both in Dallas, are now closed. The original Fort Worth location carries on with the work of our generous founder, who died in 2003. He dedicated his life to funeral service and the community. We are proud to uphold that tradition as part of the Dignity Memorial network.