The Capital of American Insurance

Hartford did not set out to become the insurance capital of America. The industry arrived by accident, or, more precisely, by fire. The Great New York Fire of eighteen thirty-five burned about thirteen acres of lower Manhattan and destroyed or damaged nearly seven hundred buildings.

Most of the New York-based insurance companies that had written policies on those buildings went bankrupt. The Hartford Fire Insurance Company, founded in eighteen ten, paid its claims in full. That reputation for paying what it owed followed the company like a flag, and Hartford's insurers built on it for the next two centuries.

By the Civil War, Hartford was the preeminent insurance center in the United States, home to fire, life, accident, and eventually automobile insurers. The Travelers Insurance Company, founded in Hartford in eighteen sixty-four as one of the first accident insurance companies in America, pioneered the idea of insuring individuals against the hazards of travel, then against the hazards of employment, then against virtually every calculable risk in American life. The Hartford, Aetna, and other companies followed.

The insurance industry brought a particular kind of capital to Hartford: patient money, institutional money, the kind that builds Gothic stone headquarters and endows theaters and parks and hospitals. Mark Twain, who lived in Hartford from eighteen seventy-four to eighteen ninety-one, noted with some amusement that his neighbors were largely insurance executives whose daily conversation ran to actuarial tables and the mathematics of mortality. The industry funded the Wadsworth Atheneum, founded in eighteen forty-two and opened in eighteen forty-four as the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the United States.

It funded Trinity College. It built the brownstone blocks and the Victorian neighborhoods on Asylum Hill and the West End that still define Hartford's architectural identity. Connecticut has reinvented itself many times.

The industry of managing risk has proved more durable than the industry of making things.