The Norfolk & Dedham Group
company

Norfolk & Dedham, and member of the N&D|Union Mutual Insurance Group, is a mutual insurance carrier based in Dedham, Massachusetts, comprising three regional property and casualty insurance companies which market personal and commercial insurance product lines through independent insurance agents. The group conducts business in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New Jersey, and writes over $400 million in Direct insurance premium. Founded as The Norfolk Mutual Fire Insurance Company in 1825, N&D is one of the oldest mutual insurance companies in the United States.
History
As early Dedham, Massachusetts residents were establishing new farms and businesses, it became apparent that the community needed financial protection against various risks such as fire. As a result, The Norfolk Mutual Fire Insurance Company was established by a group of prominent citizens, electing John Endicott as the company's first president. In 1847, Norfolk built an office building at 4 Pearl Street in Dedham Square. For the next 40 years, the building also housed the Dedham Institution for Savings, the Dedham Bank, and served as a home for the Norfolk County grand jury.
Throughout the early to mid 1900s, the company quickly grew and expanded to various states in the Northeast. In the 1950s, doing business in 26 states, the group constructed its headquarters building at their current address along the Charles River. After catastrophic events such as Hurricane Andrew, N&D eventually retrenched on its core business and now focuses on general P&C insurance in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New Jersey.
The public source identifies “The Norfolk & Dedham Group” as company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Norfolk, Dedham and Group.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17109922. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1825 and 1847.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Norfolk & Dedham Group” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.