Learn More About the Title Guaranty and Trust Company of Chattanooga
In 1887, when Henry Clay Beck founded the Chattanooga Abstract Company, his family was already firmly established in the newly created city known as Chattanooga. His father had been the owner of a quarry that was located on the present site of the Chattanooga Golf and Country Club. Stone from that quarry was used, among other projects, to build the piers of the Walnut Street Bridge, as well as the steeple of the old Centenary Methodist Church downtown and the wall around the Hamilton County Courthouse.
Beck served as Hamilton County Register then, and he saw an opportunity to pursue a business in its infancy. Before that time, when someone purchased property, research was done by an abstract agency and given to a lawyer. The lawyer simply offered an opinion on whether the deed was secure, and, for the most part, the opinion was only as good as the lawyer's.
There was a need in Chattanooga for a company that would insure titles to property. So, in 1890, Beck created the Title Guaranty and Trust Company of Chattanooga and the Chattanooga Abstract Company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of that company. Title Guaranty was the first title insurance company south of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Only Title Company in Chattanooga
Title Guaranty is the only title insurance underwriter in Chattanooga. Other title companies in this area serve only as agents for out-of-town insurers.
"This makes us special in two important ways," says Charles O. Hon III, the great-grandson of the founder and the company's sixth president. "First, it enables us to make decisions locally on what or how to insure, whereas, at other companies, the decisions are made out-of-town and usually out-of-state without that personal feel of the people or property involved. Second, and perhaps most importantly, it keeps the premium dollars in Chattanooga. They become part of the economy rather than going to a corporation in some other city."
The concept of local service mixed with top professionalism has received national recognition. In fact, in 1988-89, Hon was elected president of the American Land Title Association, the national trade group of the title insurance industry.
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