INSURANCE: Man with a Mission

On 1,170 acres of rolling Ohio farmland, bulldozers last week completed the grading job for a village of 10,000 inhabitants. Contracts were signed for some nine miles of streets, curbs and sewers, and construction crews.were building a pumping station and a million-gallon water tank. Lincoln Village, a $30 million town planned from sidewalks to railroad sidings, was being born.

Lincoln Village is the realization of a ten-year-old dream for Murray Lincoln, 61, dedicated mentor of the U.S. cooperative movement and longtime (1920-48) boss of the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation, sixth biggest U.S. farm cooperative. Lincoln is going into housing as zealously as he first sold Ohio’s individualistic farmers on the co-op movement and, later, on founding a variety of noncooperative corporations originally backed by co-op money. Today he is the $75,000-a-year president of the Farm Bureau Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. and eight subsidiary companies, including Peoples Development Co., which is building Lincoln Village. Their total assets: $133,510,000.

A Way of Life. For Murray Lincoln, cooperatives represent a way of life as well as a way of doing business. He sees the co-ops as an answer to Communism in Europe and Asia, and as a balance wheel against unfettered private enterprise in the U.S.

Born on a farm at Raynham, Mass., Lincoln has always tried to do what he thought was good for the farmer. After graduating from the Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1916, he became Connecticut’s first county agricultural agent, later took a job in Ohio as a bank agricultural agent; in 1920 the group of local and county farm cooperatives which had banded together the previous year as the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation asked Lincoln to become its executive secretary. He expanded the federation to 59,313 members with 230 co-op service stores, where the farmers bought $36 million worth of goods a year at reduced prices, and with a marketing co-op which sold $19 million in members’ products a year.

On Borrowed Capital. The co-op members complained that they had to pay auto-insurance rates as high as those of city drivers, although they diri most of their driving on safer country roads. So, with $10,000 borrowed from the federation and pledges from members for 1,000 policies, Lincoln started a mutual auto-insurance company as a private enterprise. It was a success from the start, and later began selling policies to city people, too. It now operates in 13 states and the District of Columbia, ranks fourth among all U.S. auto insurers, second among mutuals. As chief lure are rates averaging about 20% under those of companies affiliated with the National Bureau of Casualty Underwriters. Lincoln added a mutual fire-insurance company in 1934, a life-insurance company in 1936. The three companies now have 2,345,170 policies in force, of which 28% are held in cities of more than 50,000.

No Secluded Suburbia. Although Lincoln resigned from the Farm Bureau co-op after the war, he did not stop expanding. He added a radio broadcasting company, an auto loan company, a mutual investment fund. He got into housing in 1947, when he started Peoples Development Co. to build 34 homes in housing-short Bellevue, Ohio at the request of the National Machinery Cooperative. To finance home loans at Lincoln Village, he started Peoples Mortgage Co.

The new community will be no secluded suburbia. It is located two miles west of Columbus, between U.S. Highway 40 and the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. General Motors already has a plant there, and Westinghouse is building one. The village will be built around a 20-acre civic center, with a school, library, churches, playground and wooded park. It will have apartment buildings, single homes priced from $9,000 to $16,000, and a shopping center. Before the town is completed (target date: 1959), Lincoln hopes to see other communities like it springing up all over the country.