The Hartford
The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc., , usually known as The Hartford, is a Fortune 100 company and one of the nation’s largest investment and insurance concerns. With 2006 revenues of $26.5 billion, The Hartford is a leading provider of investment products, life insurance and group benefits; automobile and homeowners products; and business property and casualty insurance. The company’s international operations are in Japan, Brazil and the United Kingdom. The company’s earnings are divided equally between property-and-casualty operations and life operations.
History
The Hartford was originally founded
in 1810 in Hartford, Connecticut. A group of local merchants gathered
in a Hartford inn and, with working capital of $15,000, founded the
Hartford Fire Insurance Company. The company survived some of the
greatest peacetime tragedies in America’s history. After a huge
fire destroyed New York’s financial district in 1835, The Hartford’s
president, Eliphalet Terry, used his personal wealth to cover all
of the company’s damage claims. Other catastrophic events included
the Chicago fire of 1871 and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and
fire.
Over the years, the company has expanded
its business. In 1913, the company formed The Hartford Accident and
Indemnity Company to provide a wide variety of insurance coverage,
including accident, automobile-liability, personal-damage, business-interruption
and more. In 1959, the company expanded into the life-insurance business
by acquiring The Columbian National Life Insurance Company in Boston,
Mass. In 1970, The Hartford was acquired by ITT Corporation for $1.4
billion, at the time the largest corporate takeover in American history.
The combined company was renamed ITT-Hartford Group, Inc. In 1995,
ITT decided to streamline its operations and release some of its subsidiaries,
and The Hartford became an independent entity once again, trading
on the New
York Stock Exchange under the symbol "HIG." Two years
later, the company changed its name from ITT Hartford Group, Inc.
to The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc., and also issued an
IPO for its Hartford Life business under the ticker symbol “HLI.”
In 2000, The Hartford reacquired all the shares of Hartford Life,
and HLI was delisted from the New
York Stock Exchange in 2006.
Notable historical figures have owned
The Hartford’s policies, including Robert E. Lee, commander
of the Confederate forces during the American Civil War, who purchased
an insurance policy for his family home known as “Arlington,”
which is now part of Arlington National Cemetery. In 1861, Abraham
Lincoln purchased a policy to protect his home in Springfield, Ill.
In 1920, Babe Ruth purchased a “sickness policy” from
The Hartford the same day he was traded from the Boston Red Sox to
the New York Yankees. The policy protected his earnings if illness
prevented him from playing during spring training or the regular season.
It's not clear exactly when the stag first appeared as the company’s
logo. The oldest on record is the one that appears on the 1861 policy
issued to Lincoln. But Hartford Stags might well have appeared earlier.
A stag (or hart) fording a stream is a natural symbol for a company
named The Hartford.
The Lincoln stag, however, did not
last long. By 1867, the Hartford stag began to resemble one popularized
in an 1851 painting by Sir Edwin Landseer called “The Monarch
of the Glen.” Intended for display in the Peer’s Refreshment
Room of Parliament’s House of Commons, "Monarch of the
Glen" cause a stir when MP's refused to pay Landseer’s
price, claiming it was too steep and that they had not been properly
consulted. Eventually, the painting was sold to a private collector.
Nevertheless, once seen, few could forget the powerful image of such
a magnificent animal. Reproductions soon appeared throughout the English-speaking
world.
By 1875, the Hartford Stag clearly
echoed the Monarch of the Glen – with one slight difference.
The original Monarch appeared in a mountain setting, the company “monarch”
near a stream. Apparently, the company wished to retain the hart-ford
symbolism in its logo. But by 1890, even that last trace of the first
Hartford Stag was discarded.
In that year, the company commissioned
the John A. Lowell Company of Boston to create a large steel engraving
of Landseer’s painting, and prints were distributed across the
country through the company’s extensive agency force as the
Hartford Stag.
Minor changes to the logo have been made through the years, generally
to conform to current fashion and to printing requirements. The latter
reason was the cause of the graphic logo version introduced in 1971.
In 2004,
The Hartford purchased the Group Benefits Division of CNA
Financial, based in Chicago,
Illinois.
A bit of stag trivia - internally at The Hartford the stag is referred
to as "Larry".
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