Shawmut history

Starting in the latter half of 1939, industrial production skyrocketed.

George J. O’Connell founded Shawmut Equipment Company, Inc. in 1957 as a crane distributor in Connecticut and Western Massachusetts.

In 1965 the loosely grouped Association became the Shawmut Association, Inc., a bank holding company that controlled all the Association banks and National Shawmut itself.

In 1968 the bank effected a plan of reorganization which established the holding company, Hartford National Corp., as the umbrella that would cover the growing number of affiliates in the Hartford financial family.

By the end of 1971, assets of the National Shawmut Bank alone had reached $1.37 billion.

In 1975 Shawmut Association, Inc. was renamed Shawmut Corporation, and its expansion of banking operations continued in the form of mergers with bank holding companies rather than the simpler acquisition of independent banks.

With the passage of regional interstate banking legislation in 1985, Hartford National's "elegance" made the bank holding company a perfect match for a merger with Shawmut, springing both parties into the ring with the heavyweights of banking on a national scale.

That expansion culminated in Shawmut Corporation's 1988 merger with Hartford National Corporation, with its own historical narrative dating back to the founding of the Hartford National Bank in 1792--the fifth bank to be chartered in the United States.

In 1990 assets were reduced from $28 billion to $24 billion, and the following year its credit card business was sold at a gain of $68 million.

In the middle of 1991, Shawmut and Bank of Boston Corp. began intense negotiations for a merger that would have created new England's largest financial institution.

These and other strategic changes paid off: in October 1993, Shawmut reported a third-quarter profit of $71.1 million, more than five times the earnings for the same period of the previous year.