These guys really could bury the competition.

• Position: Brown-Wynne Funeral Home - Tar Heel Tattler

You know what provoked the sale of the state's oldest family-owned funeral home to a national chain, don't you? Stiff competition.

Raleigh's Brown-Wynne Funeral Home, founded in 1836, announced in late October its plans to sell to Service Corporation International. Texas, the state that brags about big, has the nation's largest publicly held funeral-home chain - Houston-based SCI, owner of 475-plus funeral homes. Terms of the BrownWynne sale were not disclosed.

In a business that has long stressed the horizontal, vertical integration is the new trend. Take the Brown-Wynne deal. It includes two homes in Raleigh, one in Cary, one in Zebulon, two cemeteries and a crematorium.

Larry Stegall, executive director of the 360-member North Carolina Funeral Directors Association, estimates that chains own 5 percent of the companies in the state, virtually all purchased in the past two years.

The largest homes in Charlotte, Winston-Salem, High Point, Greensboro and Wilmington now report to corporate owners. Homes in Durham and Asheville...