Notes from my Knapsack 9-13-18
Jeff Gill
Simple math, once upon a time
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From older records of Granville by Henry Bushnell and Henry Howe, to the more recent reminiscences of Charles Browne White and William Utter and Minnie Hite Moody, I enjoy reading about the simpler way things once operated.
With Ellen Hayes, whose 1920 "Wild Turkeys and Tallow Candles" still bears re-reading, I am sanguine about how much of that simplicity is recoverable in the present time. There are outlines, though, that are clearer in the sparer, harsher times of the past than we can easily pick out today.
I'm a history junkie from way back (blame my dad, inveterate stopper at historical markers), and as a preacher, old church records are for me a kind of fun (I know, I know). In the earliest decades of the 1800s through the Ohio Valley, you can read about how they built churches.
Someone would donate a piece of land. That's step one. Then you'd have to get some wood, right? Well, blue ash and yellow poplar were still common enough, but your need was for a sawyer and logger or two or twelve to come together and donate their labor for a set period of days. The rest of the furnishings? The bell, the lamps, the stove, the windows? Often, these items would have to be shipped in, but to pay for them, the congregation would pitch in sacks of grain, bolts of cloth, a chicken here, a pair of sacks of onions from another.
Some of the in-kind gifts were directly useful: a small barrel of nails, a bundle of bar stock to take to the blacksmith. Others, like a young hog, would have a more indirect if important part in getting the new church building put up.
Or you can go back farther and read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, and realize what the heart of insurance was when it had to do with fires and fire departments, such as they were. You paid your dues, and you got a plaque up on your house: the symbol in cast iron up on the brick wall said "if this house burns, put me out!" No sign, no water.
Pretty simple, eh? And as for insurance, you can tell by Poor Richard's saying "one move is like three fires" that house fires were both more common, and somewhat less devastating in the 1700s than you might think today. Chimney fires, trash out back catching the cedar shakes on the roof, candles catching the drapes . . . it happened a lot. So the idea was if each house puts $1 a year into the common pot, and if the odds were that but one house in twenty would have a fire each year, and the average fire did $20 damage, then a voluntary "company" of householders agreeing to share risk between some 5000 residences could break even. Of course, you have a year with 257 houses burning instead of 250, and you're $140 in the hole, so you collect a bit more than you need, keep a reserve on hand, and start reminding people in the company of the insured that they should always have their chimneys inspected each year.
And you get a year when only 214 houses of the 5000 with fires means $720 left over at the year's end, and then the debate is how big the reserve should be, but someone mentions the great fire in Philadelphia that spread to burn 500 homes last year, so . . .
Then there's schools. (To be continued!)
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's been paid in turnips once for preaching, but it was probably all the sermon was worth. Tell him about your interests in the past at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
