History
The company was founded in 1838 as the Atlantic Insurance Company. Originally a joint-stock company, it became a mutual company in 1842. Its first chairman was Walter Restored Jones, a member of a prominent upper-class family of attorneys in New York City. The Jones family ran the company for decades.
By the 1850s, Atlantic Mutual was the largest marine and general insurance firm in North America and the only marine insurance firm in New York state. During the 1850s, it made exceedingly high profits. In 1852, the company began keeping a clipping service of newspaper accounts of shipwrecks and sinkings known as Vessel Disasters, a work which became famous as the best source of information on maritime disasters in the North Atlantic. During the Civil War, Atlantic Mutual was the primary insurer of most Union shipping.
In 1874, Atlantic Mutual President John Divine Jones provided the money which established the permanent foundation of the New York Historical Society.
Atlantic Mutual built the existing building at 45 Wall Street in 1959, which served as the company's headquarters until the mid-1970s. Vacant and deteriorating for more than 20 years, it was sold in 1996 and converted to apartments.
Atlantic Mutual was involved in a significant tax law case which reached the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1990s. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 altered the formula under which insurance companies could deduct additions to their financial reserves. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) determined that Atlantic Mutual had strengthened its reserves, but the company countered that it had merely engaged in a computational change. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court upheld the IRS' interpretation of the law.
After the construction of the World Trade Center, Atlantic Mutual moved its headquarters from 45 Wall Street to 140 Broadway. The company was one of many which insured buildings in and around the World Trade Center, and the firm suffered significant losses after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Since Atlantic Mutual is more than 100 years old, the company is a member of The Hundred Year Association of New York.
In 2010, New York state insurance regulators revoked Atlantic Mutual’s insurance licenses because it had a negative surplus. On April 27, 2011 Atlantic Mutual was placed into liquidation after the company was swamped with workers' compensation insurance claims.
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—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)