Higginbotham, the Texas-based insurance brokerage ranked as the 12th-largest broker in the country last year, has added Harmon Dennis Bradshaw Inc., an independent agency in Alabama and Georgia, to its growing list of partner agencies.
Harmon Dennis, known as HDB, has offices in Birmingham, Montgomery, and Troy, Alabama; and in Duluth, Georgia. It was founded in 1977 as The Harmon Agency, and will now be part of the 78-year-old Higginbotham, the companies announced this week. Terms and structure of the deal were not disclosed in a news release.
David Dennis is president of HDB. He said that bringing the two firms together took time because HDB’s leadership team wanted to be sure they were joining a firm that would keep decision-making close to the clients and communities they serve.
The employee-owned Higginbotham has headquarters in Fort Worth and offices across the country, including 15 agencies in Alabama. In 2025, Insurance Journal ranked Higginbotham as the 12th-largest property-casualty agency in the United States, by revenue. Last year, the brokerage reported almost $609 million in property-casualty revenue.
The Alabama move comes two months after Higginbotham acquired Chicago-based Monarch Solutions, an insurance brokerage and financial services firm that focuses on high-net-worth clients.
The director of the Texas summer camp where 27 campers and counselors were killed by a devastating flood in 2025 testified Monday he did not see official warnings issued the day before the storm hit, that staff had no meetings about the pending danger and that they did not make the call to evacuate until it was too late.
Over several hours of sometimes emotional testimony at a court hearing packed with families of campers who were killed, Edward Eastland provided the most detailed description yet of how camp staff did or didn’t respond as floodwaters along the Guadalupe River quickly rose to historic levels, trapping children and counselors in cabins before they were swept away in the early morning dark of July Fourth.
“I wish we never had camp that summer,” Eastland said near the end of his testimony. He acknowledged lives could have been saved if camp staff acted sooner, but insisted they could not have anticipated the severity of the storm.
This week’s hearing comes during a legal battle between the camp owners and victims’ families who have filed multiple lawsuits and the families’ demands to preserve the damage at the camp site as evidence.
And it comes as Camp Mystic plans to reopen in less than two months. The camp has applied with state regulators to renew its license so that it can open an elevated area that did not flood. Camp operators have said nearly 900 girls have registered to attend.
