Long-time owner John FitzGibbons recalls trajectory of the Oswego-based agency (founded by his grandfather in 1922) and explains why Marshall + Sterling was the right company to acquire his business
By Stefan Yablonski
For more than 100 years, FitzGibbons Agency LLC has been providing quality insurance services to the Oswego and Onondaga communities.
“We’re proud to be a third-generation independent insurance agency,” said John FitzGibbons, 67.
Founded in 1922 by George FitzGibbons, the agency remains dedicated to the people and places it serves, he added.
Today the agency at 44 E Bridge St., Oswego, offers a range of personal and commercial insurance options, including home, auto, renters, business owners, liability, worker’s compensation and more. The office was located previously in the Press Box Building on East First Street.
The office reflects the agency’s history.
The walls are adorned with memorabilia of the growth of the company, the paperwork for FitzGibbons’s first job — selling popcorn at 14. He sold popcorn for 50 cents from a wagon, like the one people see at state and county fairs.
“I started by operating nightly at East Fourth and Bridge streets,” he said. “I did ultimately do fairs — including the New York State Fair.”
Every poster for Harborfest is also on display.
“I was once the president of the board of Harborfest,” he explained. “We have every poster from year one.”
In the beginning
His great-grandfather was in the boiler business. The agency sports a reconfigured boiler in its front wall — it was the night deposit box when the building was Oswego County Savings Bank.
“His son did not go into the boiler business. He went into the insurance business,” John said. “George Fitzgibbons started this in 1922.”
These days FitzGibbons can track stuff on a computer. His grandfather used a book.
“This is what I have left from his world,” he said displaying a huge book.
“This is what’s called a Sanborn map and insurance people used these. This one was first published in 1924. All the city’s buildings appear; so if you were going to write insurance on something you’d use this — and what would happen is if you see a building changed, there is a subscription and the guy would come in and he would manually update your book with overlays.
You’d subscribe to it and the change when it took place they’d come in an update it for you. You can feel where the updates are — they are tissue paper overlays. The last time this was updated was in the ’60s, I think. You weren’t putting it in your pocket,” he said of the massive tome.
His grandfather started in the real estate and insurance business in ’22. His father joined post-World War II. He went right from high school to World War II and then right to college. He joined his father in the business in ’52.
“Then I joined with my father for a couple years after I graduated from St John Fisher University. I left and worked in another agency,” FitzGibbons said. “I ultimately came back to Oswego in the insurance business in 1990.”
“I started my own enterprise in 2003. I embraced the real estate history my family had and became a broker,” he added. “My father ended his career at the port authority; he returned and did some real estate and I helped him with that and I continued after he stopped being active. It was a nod to my family history and I have a full-time broker that works with me. Really the bulk of my career is insurance. But the nod to which my history has been also.”
Pathfinder Bank partner
“Actually in 2012, [FitzGibbons Agency] became a partner with Pathfinder Bank. I elected to purchase half of the agency and we became business partners,” he explained. “We operated that way until October of 2024. It was determined that the next best step for the community, customers and employees was to integrate into a larger operation and that larger operation is Marshall + Sterling.”
Pathfinder Bank announced it sold the assets of FitzGibbons Agency to Marshall & Sterling Enterprises, Inc., an insurance broker headquartered in Poughkeepsie.
All nine FitzGibbons Agency employees, including FitzGibbons and his wife, Tara, joined Marshall+Sterling.
Founded in 1864, Marshall+Sterling is one of the 50 largest independent insurance brokerages in the U.S.
In addition to property and casualty insurance, Marshall+Sterling is a leader in employee benefits, risk management and wealth advisory services.
In 2023, the company ranked as the second-largest property and casualty and health insurance brokerage in the Capital Region, according to the Albany Business Review.
“And they write $1.6 billion in premiums. They very much have taken our success and had the ability to add to the success that we’ve achieved,” FitzGibbons said. “We are pretty broad in the services that we offer. They are even broader. So things like employee benefits and services to larger employers it helps us with those aspects of business. They have been spectacular at leveraging more resources to our community.”
“The acquisition of agencies like mine is not uncommon. That ‘knock’ was happening pretty regularly. People knock all the time. But it was only the right knock that made a difference and Marshal + Sterling was the right knock. It was the right knock, it fits the outcome for what we hope to achieve,” he explained.
45 Years in Business
FitzGibbons has been doing this for 45 years.
“I do a bunch of things; I have grandkids and I’ll do frivolous things like I’ll fly kites and ride bikes,” he said. “I’ve still got a fairly young heart, so we do recreate. We enjoy the community. I have a very strong stamp of civic engagement that comes by way of my father and mother — they were both civically deeply committed to the community. My wife is on the college council; my father was in real estate and insurance and also was mayor and port of Oswego director; my mother was social service director at St Lukes.”
In his career FitzGibbons has been president of the board of Harborfest, president of the Rotary club, president of the YMCA. “So we have committed a lot of time and effort, served on boards at the hospital — there are many things I have done in my career civically and we continue to do that. As a small business we contribute to the community,” he said.
Time to slow down?
“A business like ours only succeeds to the level of the success of the community. The investment and success of the community is long-term investment in the success of our business,” he said. “We really do all we can to advance the cause for a better community without question.
“I think what happens is it becomes a different place which you contribute to an organization. There are more people pulling on the oars, so that you can contribute in a way differently than as someone that has to do everything,” he said. “At this point I have worked in an environment where we accomplished a lot of great things. But many of them were accomplished by people who were doing multiple functions.
“I don’t necessarily have a DNA in me that says, as my father would say, ‘put my feet up and sit in the Morris chair’ [a Morris chair is an early type of reclining chair.] I guess that was the precursor to the Lazy Boy. I think that was in the ’40s. What I would say is I enjoy my work. The people I work with are very much my family. We currently have nine people and we have an office in Baldwinsville.”
Marshall + Sterling is adding staff to Oswego and Central New York. Their history began 160 years ago in Poughkeepsie where they provided insurance to the Vanderbilt family; they were of that industrial age wealth that occurred in the Hudson Valley, he said.
“As they have grown, they grew up to Albany and they started to look across the state and said, ‘OK we’d like to be more prominent in other aspects of Upstate New York. We’d like to be in Central New York.’ They looked at what we did and said this could be a good platform for them to build a Central New York presence. We are the first step of their growth plan for Central New York,” he said.
“I have two children. One is a nurse practitioner and the other is a software engineer. Neither one of them is in insurance,” he said. “They just have different interests. They aren’t compelled to do what I did. Both of them in their own ways have achieved great success — that’s what you want for your children, happiness and success.”
