Early american life insurance: goat rituals and tree stump headstones

March 25, 2016 1:19 PM

Woodmen of the World was a fraternal society formed by the conveniently named Joseph Cullen Root, who wanted to form a group that would "clear away problems of financial security for its members," in a time before Social Security, when life insurance could actually be a threat to people's lives. How do you expand your membership and ensure members pay their dues? Lodge initiation devices, initially created by Ed DeMoulin and his brothers, Erastus and Ulysses, whose workshop became known locally as the Goat Factory. And tree-trunk shaped headstones were a nice benefit for members who had passed. They're parts of Goat Rituals and Tree-Trunk Gravestones: The Peculiar History of Life Insurance [Via Presurfer]

You can browse The 1930 DeMoulin Bros. & Co. Fraternal Supply Catalog No. 439 (previously).

Other fraternal societies offered insurance, a practice with roots that go back to 100 B.C., when Caius Marius, a Roman military leader, created a burial club among his troops. For-profit companies are somewhat more recent (Google books preview), starting in the US in the early 1800s, but the operations and regulations on these agencies hadn't been refined sufficiently in a hundred years, as seen in Necessity for reform of life insurance taxation (Hathi Trust), by Lester W. Zartman, Ph.D, Yale University.

The Woodmen of the World exist to this day as a not-for-profit insurance agency, even absorbing some smaller fraternal agencies into their whole, now known as WoodmenLife (Wikipedia; official website).

If your key interest in joining is to get a tree trunk headstone, that practice was deemed too expensive in the 1920s, leading to smaller stamps to be engraved on members' headstones.

posted by filthy light thief (20 comments total)

I lead cemetery tours in Omaha, and can confirm that, yes, there are an awful lot of tree stump graves out here.
posted by maxsparber at 1:23 PM on March 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

The Woodmen of the World exist to this day as a not-for-profit insurance agency,

They sure are. Last year, they even invited me (and my partner) to one of those promotional dinners ostensibly to sell us retirement investments, though it turned out it was super-soft sell other than the 15-minute PowerPoint presentation, and mainly I got a drink, a salmon dinner with a nice dessert, and a retro-seeming ball-point pen with a flashlight built into the end. Though not quite as nice a dinner as Wells Fargo, where one of the choices was a filet mignon the size of my head (and I have a big head). The dubious perks of approaching retirement age.
posted by aught at 1:40 PM on March 25, 2016

The man was unable to pay for his last premium, and because of that he had to surrender his policy for whatever the bidders would pay. To make matters worse, the new policyholder now had an incentive to collect on his claim.

I'm not really sure how this makes sense even to the insurer. You're gonna sell out a guy who loyally paid you for an extended period of time to some rando who hands you a pittance? Even if the payee is paying a substantial portion of the insurance payout for the ownership of the policy, it's still gotta be a better deal for you the insurer to write the contract so you can pocket all his payments AND never pay a dime to anyone if you can help it. I have to imagine there was some law requiring insurance policies to pay out to require such a Byzantine scheme. Oh, and this is also completely soulless as well as irrational.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 2:05 PM on March 25, 2016

Pioneer Park in San Diego was established on an old Catholic cemetery in a kind of sordid manner - they moved the tombstones but not the bodies. Some of the tombstones were brought back after they were found dumped in a ditch after a couple decades, and I'd guess that around a third of the stones mention something about the Woodmen.
posted by LionIndex at 2:23 PM on March 25, 2016 [2 favorites]

This explains a graveyard a friend and I stumbled into in the middle of a trail race.
posted by lagomorphius at 2:23 PM on March 25, 2016

they moved the tombstones but not the bodies.

This never ends well.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:24 PM on March 25, 2016 [14 favorites]

When I was playing Ingress, I ended up cruising a lot of cemeteries (favorite portal sites). At Mission City cemetery in Santa Clara, there's a very cool example of one of the stump headstones.
posted by tavella at 2:30 PM on March 25, 2016 [3 favorites]

this is really neat - when I was a kid our closest family friends had a little ski cottage in Ellicotville, NY, and there was a graveyard we would pass on the drive down there. It had one of those tree stump headstones, and all of us kids were fascinated by it and always tried to spot it on our way past. It's cool to finally find out what that was all about. thanks for the post!
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 2:35 PM on March 25, 2016

Metafilter: I lead cemetery tours in Omaha.
posted by radicalawyer at 2:37 PM on March 25, 2016 [4 favorites]

My great great grandfather has a tree trunk stone, but it doesn't mention WOW... were these used by anyone else or can we assume he had some connection with the group?
posted by litlnemo at 3:48 PM on March 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is neat -- thanks!

The small town I grew up in was garden-variety Texas: One-block main street with red brick buildings built in the late 1890s. One of them had W O W painted between the upstairs windows until just a few years ago. I knew it stood for Woodmen of the World, but didn't know much about the organization. (And, in fact, it always seemed out of place in an area not really known for its tree cover.) Next time I'm there I'm going to look for tree stump graves.
posted by mudpuppie at 4:02 PM on March 25, 2016

Hmmm...no mention of the ubiquitous IOF Foresters? Signs for these guys adorned even the smallest town in the Western US for decades.
posted by telstar at 4:44 PM on March 25, 2016

There is one tree stump gravestone in Lakeview Cemetery, which is not the same sort of tree stump stone as the subjects of the post but, still, in that whole cemetery, is one of the most touching headstones there to behold.

It is the grave of a son who died in his twelfth year: a small stump carved with a dead dove lain before its roots, inscribed at the base: Our Boy.
posted by y2karl at 2:27 AM on March 26, 2016

This is one of those posts you see and think: of course Mefites would be interested in this. I always assumed a local connection due to Memphis' being the "hardwood capital if the world" at one point, but Omaha makes even more sense. Treestump gravestones are not uncommon in the older cemeteries in Memphis and the surrounding area. I have at least a couple of relatives buried with such. My father was a Mason but to my knowledge never a Woodman.

Thanks for posting!

Speaking of odd societies, can we expect a post on the Independent Order of Odd Fellows next?
posted by grimjeer at 7:05 AM on March 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Fantastic post. 1/3rd of American men belonged to at least one secret society at the turn of the 20th Century? Way higher than I’d have ever guessed, but with the life insurance angle it makes more sense.

Also, this solves a local graveyard puzzle for me. A while back I went walking through Denver’s Fairmount Cemetery , which was founded in 1890. I was partly killing time, partly playing Ingress (as tavella noted upthread, cemeteries have a ton of portals), and partly looking for bizarre antiquated names that I could text to my friend as joke baby name suggestions. (I campaigned hard to give her firstborn the middle name Drinkwater, but to no avail.) Anyway, I definitely didn’t see any upright tree trunks, but this solves the mystery of several “W.O.W.”-marked headstones. Some of them might have had the log-on-its-side motif? Not sure.

Anyway, that Collector’s Weekly article is amazing. “A ba-a-a attachment also makes this goat more goaty” is my new favorite snippet of marketing copy.
posted by deludingmyself at 8:21 AM on March 26, 2016

Even if the payee is paying a substantial portion of the insurance payout for the ownership of the policy, it's still gotta be a better deal for you the insurer to write the contract so you can pocket all his payments AND never pay a dime to anyone if you can help it.

Would anyone take that deal though?
posted by pwnguin at 1:24 PM on March 26, 2016

Oh, and the motivation behind the system comes down to a poverty of data. If your policy lapsed for nonpayment in late age, nobody would insure you with a new policy, because they had no idea how to price your risk. Wikipedia mentions 55 years of age as a cutoff date for eligibility in early systems.

So in this situation, you buy into permanent life insurance policy, and years of payments later, you're unable to make a payment. The policy is clear: miss a premium payment and you're out. The auction system at least lets someone else cover your payments in exchange for a substantial cut of the proceeds, and I see no way the policy could feasibly be written to prevent contracts like this. Obviously there's a host of conflict of interest problems.
posted by pwnguin at 1:44 PM on March 26, 2016

"Miss one payment and we'll keep all your money" sounds like a better deal than "Miss one payment and we'll give all your money to someone else who might kill you to collect it"
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 2:50 PM on March 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

You misunderstand I think. "Miss one payment and we'll keep all your money" is what the insurance company is offering. "I'll take over your premium payments and death benefit in exchange for an upfront lump sum" is what the market is offering. You're under no obligation to take the auctioneers up on that, but if you need money to cover rent...

It's not much different than this guy, except he has more data at his disposal, and he takes out insurance for people who never had it in the first place.
posted by pwnguin at 5:20 PM on March 26, 2016

Yesterday I was attempting to c25k in the local cemetery and remembered this post. We have a ton of these old tree trunk markers but none of the ones I looked at had any kind of marking or stamp. Was kind of hoping there'd be some interesting history involved on those markers but no. I mean, yes, they are still historically interesting to me but just lack the fraternal society angle.
posted by fluffy battle kitten at 6:46 PM on April 17, 2016