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The Hartford
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The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc., , usually known as The Hartford, is a Fortune 100 company and one of America’s largest investment and insurance companies. With 2007 revenues of $25.91 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, the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil and Ireland.
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The Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc., , usually known as The Hartford, is a Fortune 100 company and one of America’s largest investment and insurance companies. With 2007 revenues of $25.91 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, the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil and Ireland. 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. 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, Massachusetts. 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, Illinois. 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 elk 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. An elk 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" caused 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. The division was based in Chicago, Illinois.
Trivia
- Modernist poet Wallace Stevens was a vice president at The Hartford. When offered a job teaching poetry at Harvard University, Stevens rejected it in favor of continuing at the firm.
- Internally at The Hartford the stag is referred to as "Larry." The nickname comes from the name of the actual stag used in a series of television commercials: Lawrence. Beginning in the early 2000s, television commercials use a computer-generated stag, not a live animal.
- The word "stud" is hidden in the antlers of the company logo.
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