On 1,170 acres of rolling Ohio farmland,
bulldozers last week completed the grading job for a village of 10,000
inhabitants. Contracts were signed for some nine miles of streets,
curbs and sewers, and construction crews.were building a pumping
station and a million-gallon water tank. Lincoln Village, a $30 million
town planned from sidewalks to railroad sidings, was being born. Lincoln Village is the realization of a ten-year-old dream for Murray
Lincoln, 61, dedicated mentor of the U.S. cooperative movement and
longtime boss of the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation, sixth
biggest U.S. farm cooperative. Lincoln is going into housing as
zealously as he first sold Ohio's individualistic farmers on the co-op
movement and, later, on founding a variety of noncooperative
corporations originally backed by co-op money. Today he is the
$75,000-a-year president of the Farm Bureau Mutual Automobile Insurance
Co. and eight subsidiary companies, including Peoples Development Co.,
which is building Lincoln Village. Their total assets: $133,510,000. A Way of Life. For Murray Lincoln, cooperatives represent a way of life
as well as a way of doing business. He sees the co-ops as an answer to
Communism in Europe and Asia, and as a balance wheel against unfettered
private enterprise in the U.S. Born on a farm at Raynham, Mass., Lincoln has always tried to do what he
thought was good for the farmer. After graduating from the
Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1916, he became Connecticut's
first county agricultural agent, later took a job in Ohio as a bank
agricultural agent; in 1920 the group of local and county farm
cooperatives which had banded together the previous year as the Ohio
Farm Bureau Federation asked Lincoln to become its executive secretary.
He expanded the federation to 59,313 members with 230 co-op service
stores, where the farmers bought $36 million worth of goods a year at
reduced prices, and with a marketing co-op which sold $19 million in
members' products a year. On Borrowed Capital. The co-op members complained that they had to pay
auto-insurance rates as high as those of city drivers, although they
diri most of their driving on safer country roads. So, with $10,000
borrowed from the federation and pledges from members for 1,000
policies, Lincoln started a mutual auto-insurance company as a private
enterprise. It was a success from the start, and later began selling
policies to city people, too. It now operates in 13 states and the
District of Columbia, ranks fourth among all U.S. auto insurers, second
among mutuals. As chief lure are rates averaging about 20% under those
of companies affiliated with the National Bureau of Casualty
Underwriters. Lincoln added a mutual fire-insurance company in 1934, a
life-insurance company in 1936. The three companies now have 2,345,170
policies in force, of which 28% are held in cities of more than 50,000. No Secluded Suburbia. Although Lincoln resigned from the Farm Bureau
co-op after the war, he did not stop expanding. He added a radio
broadcasting company, an auto loan company, a mutual investment fund.
He got into housing in 1947, when he started Peoples Development Co. to
build 34 homes in housing-short Bellevue, Ohio at the request of the
National Machinery Cooperative. To finance home loans at Lincoln
Village, he started Peoples Mortgage Co.
