Finance History | Marsh McLennan — The Broker Who Bought Cover After the Fire
· 1905-1
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Finance History | Marsh McLennan — The Broker Who Bought Cover After the Fire
kevin
People treat Marsh McLennan as a Sixth Avenue tower that always sold consulting beside insurance.
The first Chicago book was written in the ash of 1871.
After the Great Chicago Fire, many insurers could not pay. Within weeks Daniel H. Bomar opened an agency that stressed solvency. Robert A. Waller later joined him. Henry Wheelwright Marsh, a Harvard man from Waltham, Massachusetts, came west in the 1880s, worked first at Fireman's Fund, then at R. A. Waller and Company.
Marsh's idea was not to sell a company's paper. It was to sit on the buyer's side and shop the risk.
In Duluth, Donald Roderick McLennan learned railroad insurance at Stryker, Manley and Buck, then at Graves-Manley. He held the Northern Pacific and Great Northern accounts. When Marsh and D. W. Burrows needed a man who understood the Rock Island line, they brought McLennan to Chicago.
On 22 December 1904 Burrows, Marsh and McLennan reported about three million dollars a year in premiums and called itself the world's largest insurance broker. Burrows retired. In 1906 the partnership took the name Marsh and McLennan.
The company went public in 1962 and folded itself under a holding company in 1969. Guy Carpenter arrived in 1923, Mercer in 1959. The present New York headquarters at 1166 Avenue of the Americas is a later address. The founding market was LaSalle Street and the rebuilt Loop.
The Water Tower on Michigan Avenue, finished in 1869, is the public stone that survived the fire that made the agency necessary. The first rooms were not inside that tower. They were in the insurance district the fire emptied and the railroads refilled.
The mechanism still printed on the door is the one Marsh named: a broker as buyer, not as agent of the underwriter.
Photo: public-domain and CC images of the Chicago Water Tower, via Wikimedia Commons
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