Henry Wells

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Henry Wells, lithograph, c. 1875.

Courtesy of Wells Fargo Bank

Henry Wells was a pioneering American businessman who was one of the founders of the American Express Company and of Wells Fargo & Company .

Wells's father, the Rev. Shipley Wells, was a preacher, and his mother led an itinerant life for 20 years. In 1814 the family settled permanently in Seneca Falls amid the glaciated lakes, religious upheaval, and social ferment of upstate New York.

Henry Wells was a dominating man, more than 6 feet (1.8 metres) tall and broad-shouldered. He was friendly but contrarian. Apprenticed to a shoemaker, he looked beyond that trade, and about 1824 he began opening a series of schools to cure stuttering, an affliction from which he too suffered. As he traveled through New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio teaching, he discerned lines of freight travel. By 1836, he was a freight forwarder from Albany to Buffalo on the Erie Canal, sending his cargoes then overland to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. As he did so, Wells impressed Daniel Drew, owner of the Hudson River steamboats; Erastus Corning, creator of the New York Central Railroad; and Ezra Cornell, the largest stockholder of the Western Union Telegraph Company.

The tumultuous 1840s brought opportunities suited to Wells's talents. When Pres. Andrew Jackson's longstanding hostility toward the Bank of the United States helped eliminate that institution and its check-clearing system in 1841, chaos and high rates resulted. That same year, Wells went to work for William F. Harnden, founder in 1839 of the first express company; he served as Harnden's agent in Albany, New York. The novel operation facilitated collections and transferred bank notes while alleviating many of the inconveniences of financial transactions during the mid-19th century. When Harnden then turned to Europe for growth in this business, Wells looked west.

For the next 10 years, Wells operated several small express companies along the route from Albany to Buffalo, New York. William G. Fargo had joined Wells as a messenger in 1842 and as a partner in 1845. Regardless of harsh, unpleasant conditions on roads, rails, and lakes, Wells declared, “It was the duty of the Express to go.” He had “one very powerful business rule,” summed up in one word: that his workers would deal with customers—all customers, regardless of race, creed, or condition—with “courtesy.”

During the 1840s, the federal government's mail service was deeply tied to distance, with rates varying from 6 cents to 25 cents. Wells and other northeastern expressmen delivered letters for 5 cents, forcing the government to cut rates to a uniform 5 cents. In 1845 Wells joined former stagecoach driver John Butterfield and others to construct a telegraph from Buffalo to New York after Boston and New York capitalists saw no need for the speed of electricity. On November 7, Wells's 30-mile (48.3-km) segment between Buffalo and the Erie Canal town of Lockport became the pioneer commercial telegraph.

Wells's next venture was the American Express Company, which was founded on March 18, 1850. After the board of American Express vetoed the company's expansion to California, Wells and other investors established the Wells, Fargo & Company to handle the banking and express business prompted by the California Gold Rush.

The American Civil War years brought huge profits to American Express and Wells Fargo but declining health to Wells. Following his retirement from the board of Wells Fargo in 1867 and from American Express in 1868, Wells turned his attention to the “dream of [his] life”: higher education for women. With the help of benefactors, land near his home in Aurora, New York, was transformed into Wells Seminary (later Wells College) for women (now coed). In his final years, Wells traveled for his health, eventually settling in Glasgow, Scotland, where he died in 1878.