Profile · Stevens Point, Wisconsin
Peter J. “P.J.” Jacobs
Hardware dealer who moved Hardware Dealers Mutual (later Sentry) to Stevens Point in 1912
$250,000
Peter J. “P.J.” Jacobs was the Stevens Point hardware dealer who packed a mutual-insurance office out of Berlin, Wisconsin, in 1912 and made Hardware Dealers Mutual—later Sentry Insurance—a Point company. The junior high on Main Street still carries his name. Born and raised in Stevens Point (1869–1936), he ran Gross & Jacobs Hardware with Nick Gross in the old post-office building on Main and served as secretary of the state hardware dealers association. The mutual had been writing small fire policies out of Berlin since 1904; Jacobs moved the typewriters, desks, files, and roughly ninety thousand dollars in assets home to Stevens Point and anchored the company there. In the 1920s he traveled to Indiana more than once to hire stone carvers and choose stone for the Strongs Avenue door frames. He was a Rotary charter member and a St. Stephen’s parishioner. He died in April 1936. His son Carl took the chair, and for a stretch grandson James sat in it too; the family ran the firm through 1966. Two years after the funeral the city put his name on a new high school, dedicated June 1, 1938; when SPASH took the seniors in 1972, the Main Street building remained P.J. Jacobs Junior High. Sentry is still headquartered in Stevens Point, and the restaurant at SentryWorld is called PJ’s because a granddaughter remembered that he liked a family table.