Jacob's Insurance

It resulted in a lawsuit.

The culmination was on the sixth day of September, 1881 — that strange yellow day that attracted so much attention in the Eastern and Middle States— and the place of the trial was Albany.

Jacob’s farm house was near the Cove, about seven miles below Albany. From his door he could look down upon the Hudson. The Cove, by the old landing, with its decayed houses, was also visible. The cars racing along the further shore of the river were a lively feature. A dozen miles lower down the valley, the river hides behind the Catskills.

In this house thus picturesquely situated, Jacob and his ancestors had lived for ninety years. The family name was an inheritance.

Jacob was forty-two years old, tall, blonde, with a mobile face, and a dash of red in his cheeks.

On the 17th day of September, of the year previous to that of the yellow day, Jacob was awakened in the night. He heard his pigs squealing and “bucking,” as he termed it, against his house. He went out, half dressed, and found the pig pen a heap of embers. Mary, his wife, and William, his boy, came out. They found all the pigs, but they were scorched and knocked about, and one died in a few minutes of his burns. The family went to bed again, but did not sleep much.

In the morning Jacob got out his insurance policy, and he and Mary and Willie looked it over. They did not see anything about a pig pen in it, and so he put it away again.

A week later Jacob’s small barn, four rods south of his house, burned. It was in the daytime, in the afternoon. Jacob came back from Albany at 5 o’clock and saw only the vacancy. Willie said that at 3 o’clock it was on fire. Some of the neighbors had come, but nothing could be done. It was of pine boards, thirty years old, and empty.

The insurance policy “had all about the barns” in it, Jacob therefore went to “Silas” at the Cove… Read More