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Rappahannock Home Mutual Fire Insurance Company, the county’s oldest continuously operated business, celebrated its 100th anniversary last week.
The company’s birthday present to its policy holders was a promise to continue the sound management practices that made a rate increase unnecessary for 27 years while the costs of just about everything else skyrocketed annually.
The Postal Service could take lessons from this little in-county operation. According to company records, customers received their yearly assessment notice—along with word that rates would increase from 12Vi to 15 per cent per hundred—on a penny postcard in 1951. In 1978, those same assessment notices accompanied by a 25 per cent rate increase went out again but this time, on nine cent post cards. While the U.S. Mail showed charges up 900 per cent, over the last quarter century the county’s “home town" fire insurance business kept its increase at a much less embarrassing level.
Rappahannock Home Mutual received its charter to sell fire insurance on
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