While the great transportation functions of the railroad are devoted to the comparatively simple problems of soliciting and carrying both passengers and freight in ordinary channels, there are, nevertheless, special functions of the carrier that demand some slight attention in passing. These functions might quite properly be known as the by-products of transportation. The most important of them are the carrying of small packages of rather greater value than that the railroad ordinarily gives to the goods that it handles in its own cars, and the carrying of letters and periodicals. These last two are handled as a monopoly by the Federal Government, which also competes with a half-dozen big private corporations in the transportation of merchandise in small individual lots. The Government calls its service the railroad mail and it is the bone and sinew of the Post-office Department. The private corporations, creeping in upon what is also generally a government monopolistic privilege in other lands, handle what they are pleased to call the express business. Their business has grown up alongside of that of the United States Government and the development of the two has run in very similar channels.
The express business, like a good many other big businesses, began in rather simple fashion. Before the railroad came into being, the citizens in the different towns of the young and rather sprawling nation along the Atlantic seaboard found it a difficult problem to communicate with one another. They used to entrust letters and valuable packages to the drivers of stage-coaches or to the captains of coasting-vessels. If the drivers or the captains remembered the letter-packet or the package, it was safely delivered. If they forgot—! So, when the railroad came and drove the old stage-lines out of business, the conductors of the trains were asked to accept this side responsibility as an informal part of their work. As long as this messenger function remained a slight thing, the railroads paid little attention to the practice, but after a while, the conductors got to paying more attention to it than to running the trains and the railroads finally had to stop it.
In the golden age when the conductor’s job was developing this valuable perquisite, William F. Harnden had charge of a passenger train on the old Boston & Worcester Railroad—a part of the Boston & Albany, which, in turn, is a part of the New York Central lines. Harnden had entered railroad service in 1834, when he was but twenty-two years old. He foresaw the day when the railroads would have to put a stop to their conductors acting as messengers for the general public, and so, a few years after he had gone to work for the Boston & Worcester, he went to the superintendent of that highly prosperous little line, as well as to the highly prosperous Boston & Providence, and asked for an exclusive contract for an express service over it as part of a through route between New York and Boston. So it came about that in a Boston newspaper of February 23, 1839, the following advertisement appeared:
“Boston and New York Express Car. William F. Harnden has made arrangements with the Providence railroad and the New York Boat company to run a car through from Boston to New York and vice-versa four times a week commencing Monday, March 4. He will accompany the car himself, take care of all small packages that may be entrusted to his care and see them safely delivered. All packages must be sent to his office, 9 Court street, Boston; or 1 Wall street, New York.”
That “car” was a flight of Harnden’s imagination, because for several months a valise sufficed to carry all the packages that were entrusted to his care. But he progressed, and after a little time he found it necessary to engage his brother and still another man to act as messengers with him. The following year he extended his express service to Philadelphia and to Europe. You may be sure that the success of Harnden’s experiment was being noticed by the thrifty New Englanders. Alvin Adams, who had been in the grocery commission business up in Vermont, established an express service of his own in 1840, which in due course of time was to become the Adams Express Company. It is possible that there might have been to-day a Harnden Express Company as well, if America’s pioneer expressman had not died six years after establishing his interesting venture.
After Alvin Adams, came a host of express services springing up all over the eastern end of the United States. Henry Wells, who had been the associate of Harnden in the development of his business, formed a partnership with one George Pomeroy for a service between Albany and Buffalo. William G. Fargo, the freight-agent for the one-time Albany and Syracuse Railroad, was the freight-agent for Pomeroy and Wells at Buffalo in 1842. Wells and Fargo eventually got together, and in the throbbing days of the late forties and the fifties, Wells, Fargo & Co. became an express service of magnitude, a concern not to be lightly reckoned with.
Strangely enough, the express companies came to their first prosperity through the thing that they are now forbidden to carry—letters. For in the early forties the United States Post-office Department demanded six cents for carrying a letter thirty miles, eight cents for sixty miles, ten cents for one hundred miles—the ratio steadily progressing until twenty-five cents was charged for 450 miles. Those rates had been in effect since the department was first established, and the service was fearfully slow, and untrustworthy into the bargain. The new express companies took advantage of their opportunity and—to cite a single instance—they would carry a letter from Buffalo to New York for six cents, while the Government charged twenty-five cents for a similar, but an inferior service.
In 1850 the express services were beginning to be merged—Livingston & Company and Wells & Company had already formed the American Express Company. Four years later, Adams & Company, Harnden & Company, and some of the smaller express services united in the formation of the Adams Express Company,—and in that year the minstrel men began to ask the question: “For whom was Eve made?” The United States Express Company was also organized in 1854, and all this while Wells, Fargo & Company were forming history for themselves in the Far West—carrying mail out to the gold miners and their precious dust east in return.
