My lineageChapter IV / VIII1868–1928

Colonel Hodson and honest credit

What crosses from one world to another : credit

Across the Atlantic, Clarence Hodson built a way to lend to people the banks ignored, and founded a trust that would fund education in Maryland for a century.

A bank president at twenty-five

Clarence Sherwood Hodson was born on 22 February 1868 in Laurel, Delaware, and grew up in Crisfield, Maryland. Admitted to the bar in 1889, he became president of the Bank of Crisfield, founded by his family in 1892, at about twenty-five. His title of colonel was honorary, conferred by the Governor of Maryland in 1896.

Against the loan sharks

In the early twentieth century, an American worker who needed a small loan had little choice but the loan sharks and their ruinous rates. In 1914, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Hodson founded the Beneficial Loan Society to lend to him at a fair rate, on the strength of his character. In 1919 he published Money-Lenders, a study of the small-loan business, drafted a model anti-usury statute and worked with the Russell Sage Foundation on the Uniform Small Loan Law.

The Hodson Trust

In 1920, with Clarence’s assets, his father Thomas S. Hodson settled the Hodson Trust, amended in 1927. Invested in shares of what became the Beneficial Corporation, it supported four Maryland institutions for a century: Hood College, Washington College, St. John’s College and Johns Hopkins University. Its records list more than 440 descendants. Clarence Hodson died on 13 January 1928, aged fifty-nine.