The county mutual: Farmers' Mutual Insurance Company of St. Joseph and Marshall Counties

THE TOWNSHIP PATTERN AT COUNTY SIZE · IN THE RECORD 1937 · EXAMINED 2012, 2017, 2022

The pattern: across nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indiana, the farm risk that stock companies priced high or refused was carried by farmers' mutual fire insurance associations — policyholder-owned companies, organized by county or township, assessing their members for their losses. Penn Township's farms sat inside that pattern, and the mutual of record for this county is the Farmers' Mutual Insurance Company of St. Joseph and Marshall Counties.

The company in court, on a fire loss: the mutual stands in the reported record in Farmers' Mutual Insurance Co. of St. Joseph and Marshall Counties v. Young, No. 15,682, Indiana Appellate Court, filed October 14, 1937 — a suit on the company's own policy, face one thousand dollars, on property in Marshall County, in which a concurrent policy of the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, six hundred dollars dated August 16, 1932, figures in the pleadings. The pairing is the institution in miniature: the local mutual and the great Hartford stock company writing side by side on the same risk, each for its share.

The company in the present record: the Indiana Department of Insurance's domestic examination reports list the company (NAIC No. 92301) with examinations in 2012, 2017 and 2022 — the county mutual still a regulated, examined Indiana insurer in the present decade. Nonprofit-directory listings place its office at 440 E. Jefferson Street, Plymouth, the Marshall County seat; the 1989 date those listings carry is an Internal Revenue Service ruling date, not a founding, and is not printed as one.

The gaps, printed as gaps: the mutual's founding date, and whether a separate Penn Township association ever stood beneath or beside the county company, are not established by the records read. The settling sources are named: the company's charter and annual statements in the Indiana Department of Insurance's records, and the Indiana State Archives' corporation filings. No second, township-only mutual is entered here, because none was found; the county company is the mutual the record keeps.

Sources:

1. Farmers' Mutual Insurance Co. of St. Joseph and Marshall Counties v. Young, No. 15,682 (Ind. App. Oct. 14, 1937), case.law.
2. Indiana Department of Insurance, domestic examination reports list — Farmers' Mutual Insurance Co. of St. Joseph and Marshall Counties, NAIC 92301, examinations 2012, 2017, 2022 (secure.in.gov/idoi).
3. Nonprofit directory listings for the company, office at 440 E. Jefferson St., Plymouth, Indiana (IRS ruling date 01/1989, not a founding date).