The Travelers Companies, Inc.
Property and Casualty InsuranceFounded 1853- Updated June 2026
Reviewed by Swet Parvadiya
Last reviewed: June 2026
CorpDigest
The Travelers Companies, Inc.
Company History
Founded 1853 in New York, New York
Last reviewed: 2026-06-10 · By Swet Parvadiya
Eliphalet Terry, James G. Batterson, and Henry R. Fitch established the Firemen's Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut in 1853, selling accident coverage to travelers on the Hartford to New York railroad line for a penny per mile. The premise was simple: people traveling by rail faced a new kind of accidental injury risk that no existing insurance product addressed. The new product worked. The company renamed itself The Travelers Insurance Company in 1864 and introduced the now-iconic red umbrella as its symbol in 1898.
The red umbrella was chosen deliberately as a visual metaphor for protection — something that keeps you dry when conditions turn bad. It became one of the most recognized corporate symbols in American insurance history, surviving multiple acquisitions, divestitures, and corporate restructurings over the following century.
The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was the company's first catastrophic test. Travelers paid claims. The 1990 asbestos and environmental liability crisis was the second — and more existential — test. Industrial companies had used asbestos for decades, creating latent injury claims that would not be filed until decades after the exposure. Insurers who had written general liability policies for those companies found themselves facing liabilities that their original pricing assumptions had not anticipated. Travelers spent years managing and reserving against those exposures before reaching resolution in 1995.
The current corporate structure reflects a 2004 merger of Travelers Property Casualty with St. Paul Companies, creating a combined entity with significantly more geographic and product diversification. The red umbrella and the Hartford roots remain, but the company now writes commercial lines across every major industry sector and personal lines in most US states.
Eliphalet Terry (1798–1875) was an American merchant, industrialist, and the primary architect of the conservative underwriting philosophy that defined the early years of Travelers Insurance. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Terry made his early fortune in the mercantile trade before recognizing the massive, unpriced risk of catastrophic fire in the rapidly industrializing cities of the American Northeast. In 1853, he led a group of prominent Hartford businessmen in pooling their capital to form the Firemen's Insurance Company of Hartford, serving as the company's first president. Terry's philosophy was that an insurance company's only true asset was its capital surplus, and he insisted on maintaining reserves far exceeding statutory requirements, a strategy that allowed the company to survive the Great Boston Fire of 1871 and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. He later served in the Connecticut state legislature and was a major philanthropist, donating heavily to local hospitals and educational institutions. Terry's vision transformed a small, localized fire underwriter into a national financial institution, embedding a culture of extreme capital conservatism that remains the foundational DNA of Travelers today.
James G. Batterson (1803–1889) was an American businessman, insurance executive, and educational philanthropist who played a foundational role in the creation and early expansion of Travelers Insurance. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Batterson started his career in the marble and monument business before shifting his focus to the nascent insurance industry. He partnered with Eliphalet Terry to form the Firemen's Insurance Company of Hartford in 1853, serving as a key director and strategic advisor during the company's formative years. Batterson's genius lay in risk diversification; he recognized that the concentrated urban fire risk was inherently volatile, and he successfully lobbied the board to expand into marine and inland marine insurance in 1859, covering the cargo and vessels that were transporting goods along the rapidly expanding canal and river networks of the Midwest. This strategic move diversified the company's risk pool and established the template for its future expansion into transportation and accident insurance. After amassing significant wealth from the insurance business, Batterson shifted his focus to the European art trade and philanthropy, ultimately playing a key role in the founding of the Wadsworth Atheneum museum of art in Hartford. His legacy endures both in the diversified risk model he helped establish and the cultural institutions he endowed.
The company is founded in Hartford, Connecticut, by Eliphalet Terry and a group of prominent businessmen to provide fire insurance to the rapidly industrializing cities of the American Northeast, securing the initial capital and charter that would eventually become Travelers.
The company officially changes its name to The Travelers Insurance Company, reflecting its expanded focus on the risks associated with the rapidly growing transportation network, including the newly emerging railroad industry, and introducing the first formal accident insurance policy for railroad passengers.
Travelers introduces the iconic red umbrella logo, which would become synonymous with the company's brand, trademarking and aggressively marketing it in the United States as a symbol of protection against the storms of life.
The company survives the catastrophic 1906 San Francisco earthquake, paying out massive claims that nearly bankrupted the entity, but ultimately forcing a strategic pivot away from concentrated geographic risk toward a diversified national portfolio and a culture of extreme capital conservatism.
After a decade of massive losses from asbestos and environmental liability claims, Travelers successfully resolves its legacy liability exposure through a massive settlement and restructuring, allowing the company to resume writing general liability business and focus on its core property and casualty operations.
Travelers completes the $14 billion merger with the St. Paul Companies, the largest in U.S. property-casualty insurance history at the time, instantly doubling the company's footprint in the commercial auto and liability markets and creating the second-largest commercial insurer in the United States.
Travelers completes the spin-off of its remaining life insurance and wealth management assets into a separate publicly traded company, later known as MetLife's successor entity, to streamline its balance sheet and focus exclusively on property and casualty insurance.
Travelers acquires the personal insurance business of AIG for $1.1 billion, adding 1.5 million policies to its direct-to-consumer and independent agent channels, instantly scaling its homeowners and auto book to compete with the largest national carriers.
Travelers achieves a highly profitable 96.5 combined ratio for the fiscal year 2024, generating $36.5 billion in total revenues and $4.5 billion in net income, demonstrating the immense profitability of its dual-engine business model in a hardening rate environment.
Travelers traces its roots to 1853, when Eliphalet Terry, James G. Batterson, and Henry R. Fitch chartered the Firemen's Insurance Co. of Hartford in Hartford, Connecticut. Batterson was the primary driving force, and after he traveled through England studying the new concept of accident insurance against railway and steamship risks, the company expanded its mandate and was renamed Travelers Insurance Co. in 1864. That repositioning made Travelers one of the first U.S. carriers to sell accident insurance to ordinary travelers, beginning with a famous two-cent policy Batterson wrote covering banker James Bolter for the four-block walk from the Hartford post office to his home. The company added life insurance in 1864 and broadened into employer's liability, automobile insurance (1897, one of the first auto policies issued in the U.S.), and workers' compensation in the early twentieth century. The iconic red umbrella logo, still in use, was adopted in 1898 to symbolize protection. Over the next century the firm became one of the largest multi-line carriers in the United States, weathering the Hartford fire markets, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake claims, the Great Depression, and the postwar expansion of personal lines insurance, before entering the Citigroup era in 1998.
In April 1998, Sandy Weill's Travelers Group, which had acquired the original Travelers Insurance from Primerica's parent in 1993, announced a $70 billion merger with John Reed's Citicorp to form Citigroup. The deal closed in October 1998 and was a catalyst for the repeal of Glass-Steagall via the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, since it combined commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance under one holding company. The combination quickly proved awkward. Citigroup spun off the property-casualty operations as Travelers Property Casualty Corp. in a March 2002 IPO, and divested its life and annuity operations to MetLife in 2005 for about $11.5 billion. The independent Travelers Property Casualty then merged in April 2004 with The St. Paul Companies of Minnesota in a $16 billion stock deal, creating St. Paul Travelers, the second-largest commercial property-casualty insurer in the country. The combined firm dropped the St. Paul prefix in February 2007 and adopted the current name, The Travelers Companies, Inc., reclaiming the red umbrella brand that had been sold to Citigroup years earlier.
Travelers was added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average on June 8, 2009, replacing Citigroup, the very company it had been spun out of seven years earlier. Citigroup was removed because its share price had collapsed below two dollars during the financial crisis, making it too small to meaningfully move the price-weighted Dow. General Motors was also removed in the same reshuffle, replaced by Cisco Systems. The inclusion of Travelers signaled a strategic statement by the index committee. The Dow wanted a property-casualty insurer to represent the broader U.S. insurance industry, and Travelers offered a stable balance sheet, a Triple-A reinsurance program at the time, and roughly $25 billion in revenue. The stock has remained in the index since 2009 and is the only dedicated multi-line property and casualty insurer in the thirty-stock blue-chip benchmark. Membership in the Dow has reinforced Travelers' standing with institutional investors, broadened analyst coverage, and increased passive index ownership through ETFs that track the Dow Jones Industrial Average, supporting the company's relatively low cost of equity capital.
The red umbrella first appeared in Travelers marketing materials in 1898 as a symbol of protection against life's storms, and the company began registering it as a service mark in the early twentieth century. The umbrella was tied to the firm's accident and life insurance lines and became one of the most recognized logos in American financial services. When Travelers Group sold its insurance operations into Citigroup in 1998, the red umbrella went with the deal and briefly served as a corporate symbol for the entire Citigroup conglomerate. In 2007, Citigroup sold the umbrella trademark back to St. Paul Travelers for approximately $200 million, allowing the newly renamed Travelers Companies to restore the original brand. Travelers then rolled the icon back into its advertising, sponsorship of the PGA Tour's Travelers Championship (formerly the Greater Hartford Open), and the prominent red umbrella on the roof of its 388 Greenwich Street tower in New York. The repurchase is often cited in branding case studies as one of the most expensive logo repatriations in corporate history and as a marker of Travelers' independence after the Citigroup era.
The Travelers Companies, Inc. maintains its principal executive offices in New York City at 485 Lexington Avenue, with a major operations and underwriting hub in Hartford, Connecticut, the historic home of the original 1853 charter. The company also operates a large campus in St. Paul, Minnesota, inherited from the St. Paul Companies merger of 2004, plus claim centers and field offices in every U.S. state and operations in Canada, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and Brazil through partnerships and country units. As of recent reporting, Travelers generates roughly $36.5 billion in annual revenue, has more than 30,000 employees, and commands a market capitalization near $55 billion. The company writes more than $40 billion in net written premiums across personal, commercial, and bond and specialty lines, manages an investment portfolio of about $90 billion, and remains the largest writer of workers' compensation insurance in the United States. Travelers is a component of the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average and consistently maintains an A+ Superior financial strength rating from A.M. Best and AA ratings from Standard & Poor's on its core operating insurance subsidiaries.