THE VENTURES OF HARNDEN, ADAMS, WELLS AND FARGO
The first reliable and extensive express service, however, does date from 1839. In that year, William F. Harnden grasped the need for, and chance of profit in, the delivery of valuable parcels between Boston and New York and to that end made a contract for his personal transportation on the Boston and Providence Railroad—the first express contract in the United States. Harnden made four trips weekly, by rail to Providence and thence to New York by boat; and carried the expressed articles in a hand satchel. But within several months the business outgrew that humble forerunner of the modern express car, and he was compelled to hire additional express messengers, to set up offices, and to arrange for special space on trains.
So successful was Harnden's venture and so serviceable that he soon found himself confronted by many imitators and competitors. In 1840, Alvin Adams entered the New England-New York field, thus becoming the founder of the present Adams Express Company; and later in the same year Harnden extended his business to Philadelphia. In the following year, Henry Wells and a partner established an express service between Albany and Buffalo. By 1845 express companies had sprung up on every hand. In the latter year Wells and William G. Fargo developed a company to cover territory, much of it railroadless, west of Buffalo; and very soon this service reached Chicago. Early in the fifties Wells and Fargo were delivering in California by the stage coach and pony express of song and story and motion picture, although it was not until 1869 that the first transcontinental railroad was completed. (The pre-occupation of the present Wells-Fargo Express Company with the western field is thus not fortuitous.) And by the early fifties also Adams and Company was beginning to tap the South.