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It’s not unusual for me to romanticize “the days of old”—a full Laura Ingalls Wilder-inspired fantasy where everyone spends quiet evenings by a cozy fire, darning socks and reading the classics. There’s always bread rising, a vase of wildflowers, a gentle prairie breeze drifting through the cabin and the whole scene glowing with pioneer-era charm.
In that fantasy, I am thriving.
I tell myself I’d be great at pioneer life. Bread baking? Absolutely. Tending livestock? You bet. Chopping wood? Sure — spoken like someone who spends 99% of her work hours at a desk and whose relationship with actual sunlight is … complicated. But in my mind, I am wholly capable. Resilient. Rugged, even.
But there’s one thing missing from that fantasy that makes it completely unrealistic. That thing is insurance.
The recent wave of storms and tornadoes in Indiana once again sent me down a mental rabbit hole. On May 16, 1899, my great-grandmother narrowly survived a tornado that killed multiple members of her family. An F4 tornado tore across the rural Iowa landscape for 20 minutes. It then veered north, spared the little town of Colesburg and then destroyed my ancestors’ farm before finally lifting.
The Colesburg cyclone slashed a 200-yard-wide swath across 7 miles of countryside, striking 15 farms and destroying at least seven of them. Damage was estimated at $250,000 (about $10 million today), and five people were killed. Along the entire route, only one farm had what folks back then called “cyclone insurance.”
In “History of Colesburg” (1993), the most destructive tornado the area had ever seen gets its own chapter — and a branch of our family gets its own subheading: “Destruction of a Family.” The tornado struck the Walter and Evaline Shepard place, and the book doesn’t sugarcoat the loss. “[T]his family would not survive intact.” Accounts note the wind was so violent it drove straw into boards.
Walter and two of their boys, ages 3 and 12, were killed. The other two boys, ages 7 and 9, barely survived. Evaline, seven months pregnant when the storm hit, lived long enough to bring Lucinda (my great grandmother) into the world — but lived only five more years herself. Evaline’s obituary tied her death to the cyclone, noting she had been “poorly” in the years after. People scrambled to buy cyclone insurance after the storm, which is entirely understandable and several days too late.
This is what I never saw in my romantic prairie daydream: not just toppled barns but a family scattered — and a line of descendants (mine) — hanging by a fragile thread.
I’ve known of this story since childhood, but I always saw it as the beginning of Lucinda’s life and not the abrupt, devastating end of everything that came before. Now, seeing it through adult eyes — as a mother of three and manager of far too many things for one person — I see the loss differently. More sharply, and as more of an account of what was lost.
Evaline’s story would be different today for many reasons, but maybe the most heartbreaking one is that in 1899 there were few safety nets. No property coverage. No health insurance. No life insurance. No business interruption coverage. No “call your agent” moment. When the storm came, it wasn’t just the house that went. It was often the future.
And listen — I love to imagine myself as tough. But I’m “carry all the grocery bags in one trip” tough, not “rebuild the homestead after a deadly cyclone” tough.
Fast forward 127 years, Indiana’s 2026 weather has already been showing off. By mid-March, the state had eight confirmed tornadoes, including an EF3 near Lake Village (Newton County) and an EF2 near Knox (Starke County) — nearly triple Indiana’s typical early season count. And it wasn’t even spring yet.
In 1899, recovery depended on luck, neighbors and sheer will. In 2026, we still rely on neighbors, but we also have systems. Invisible ones. Often ignored, always crucial.
For better or worse, risk has scaled up — and so has the safety net. The global insurance industry had a market value of roughly $8 trillion in 2024, bigger than the GDP of many nations and vastly larger than anything my great-great-grandmother could have imagined. Yet, even at that scale, insurance mostly stays out of sight. It’s the quiet scaffolding behind modern life. Even for someone who eats and breathes insurance at work (picture three or four policy tabs open at any given time) and litigates insurance disputes, it’s easy to forget it’s there. It’s easy to forget just how much that is what has changed since 1899.
As communities across the Midwest tally the damage from recent storms, I’m reminded that personal recovery is never guaranteed. But unlike in 1899, we now have structures designed to keep families and businesses from facing the aftermath entirely alone.
And me? I’ll keep the rocking chair aesthetic, the bread baking and the wildflowers (probably from a grocery store). I’ll even go for the calloused hands and sunburn. But I’m under no illusion: I’m not cut out for a world without insurance. I’m tough — just not that tough.•
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Goodfellow is of counsel in the Indianapolis office of Ice Miller and serves on the board of directors for the Defense Trial Counsel of Indiana.
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