Moment in Time (July 14, 2022)

Murray D. Lincoln and his wife Anne are shown in the living room of their Sunbury Road home, reading his autobiography “Vice President in Charge of Revolution”. His portrait photo from the memoir is shown at the bottom right. The upper left is his First Ave. home in Grandview before it was renovated by architect Lajos Szabo, who had purchased the home and added the turret at the main entrance (top right).

Murray Danforth Lincoln was a huge proponent of the idea that a co-op philosophy could shape a successful business enterprise. He was born on a farm in Massachusetts and became New England’s first county extension agent in Connecticut in 1914, and a year later started one of the first cooperative milk distributing plants in the region. He moved to Cleveland to join the Cleveland Society for Savings as an agricultural representative, and in 1920 was named the executive secretary of the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation, prompting a move to their headquarters in Columbus. Within a few months, he had grown the federation to over 60,000 members with 240 co-op stores selling at reduced retail nearly $36M in products. He also started a marketing co-op to sell nearly $19M of the members’ products around the world.

A New York Times article reported that one of the main complaints of his federation members was the high cost of automobile insurance that they were being charged by insurance companies, claiming that farm families always drove on safer rural roads and shouldn’t be charged the same as city drivers whose accident rates were greater. Lincoln borrowed $10,000 from 1000 members and founded a “mutual” vehicle insurance company, called the Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company, to respond to their complaint. The farmers served as “agents” to sell policies to other farmers. He also helped form electrical co-ops through President Roosevelt’s New Deal Federal Rural Electrification Administration, providing low-cost electric to 98% of the farms in Ohio.

In 1923, Lincoln and his wife Anne (née Hurst) purchased the property in the Northwest Boulevard subdivision at 1468 West First Avenue, which was later renumbered to 1234 West First. They and their daughter Elizabeth moved into the home in late 1923 or early 1924. Murray Lincoln was a member of the Columbus Riding Club and kept a horse and sulky on the First Avenue property in a stable in the home’s carriage house. (He later helped start the River Ridge Riding Club located on Henderson Road.) The Lincoln’s honored Elizabeth on her 10th birthday by planting a small tree in the back of the house, which grew over the years to be a significant part of the backyard. Unfortunately, Elizabeth died at 15 years of age due to what her Grandview friends recalled in an interview as a bout of appendicitis (the formal cause of death was a heart condition.) He stated in his memoir that he always regretted not spending more time with her as he focused on his business interests. Several years later the Lincolns sold the house and moved from Grandview to a 1900-acre farm on Sunbury Road in Northeast Columbus.

Lincoln left the Farm Bureau in 1948 to devote more time to his insurance cooperative, which had grown from an auto insurance company to encompass three other insurance efforts. He expanded the reach of the four companies, and in 1953 incorporated them under the umbrella of Nationwide. The four companies were named Nationwide Mutual Insurance, Nationwide Life, Nationwide General Insurance, and Nationwide Mutual Fire Insurance. They have grown significantly since, and Nationwide is now firmly in the Fortune 500 rankings.

From 1941 until 1965 Lincoln was president of the National Cooperative Business Association, and he was also a board member of the International Cooperative Alliance. Lincoln helped found CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) in 1945 and served as president for 12 years. In 1957, Lincoln became CARE's first chairman, a post he held until 1966. Because of his expertise in the philosophy of co-op ventures, President-elect John F. Kennedy asked Lincoln to head the task force on the proposed Food for Peace program to provide food assistance around the world. The task force urged the United States to expand its global food program and give or sell at least $3 billion worth of surplus food annually at cut-rate prices to poorer nations. In 1961, Lincoln was appointed to the Peace Corps advisory council, and was a member of the executive committee of the U.S. Committee for the United Nations, the U.N. Advisory Council, and the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Conference on Food and Agriculture. 

Lincoln was a friend of local developer John Galbreath, who helped him start the River Ridge Riding Club. Together they participated in projects in Columbus that were consistent with Lincoln’s co-op ideology. For example, they worked together to plan the Market Mohawk District urban renewal on the site of the old Central Market. They also collaborated to plan and develop the Lincoln Village community on West Broad. The 800-unit community, named after him, and the associated 5-acre Lincoln Lodge, cost $130M and was developed by his Peoples Development Company, the predecessor of the Nationwide Development Company that developed Grandview Yard. Lincoln also oversaw the development of Annehurst Village near Westerville, which he named in honor of his wife, the former Anne Hurst.

In 1951, in honor of his company’s 25th anniversary, Nationwide executives presented Lincoln with a reproduction of a room in a traditional New England farmhouse that he remembered from childhood. It was built in a small study next to Lincoln’s office, and he often sought solitude there. It was reproduced at the end of a corridor in the 40-story Nationwide Building on High Street when it was completed, as a reminder of how a humble person could help build one of the largest insurance companies in the nation.

After a two-year illness, Lincoln died November 7, 1966. He and his wife Anne were noted philanthropists, and the Murray D. Lincoln Campus Center at the University of Massachusetts, where he received his BS degree in 1914 when it was called the Massachusetts Agricultural College, is named in his honor. The Murray D. Lincoln Endowed Chair in Cardiothoracic Surgery at Nationwide Children’s Hospital is also named for him.

References:
1.     Murray Danforth Lincoln, Vice President in Charge of Revolution, McGraw Hill, 1960.
2.     Betsy Butler Blog, https://beesfirstappearance.wordpress.com/2015/05/23/lincoln-2/
3.     Special Collections & University Archives, Umass Libraries, http://scua.library.umass.edu/youmass/doku.php?id=l:lincoln_murray_d
4.     Lincoln Village (Wikipedia) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Village,_Ohio
5. James Nagle, Personality: Co-Op Man a Rugged Idealist, New York Times, July 16, 1961