Finance History | American Express — Three Rival Lines Signed at Buffalo on 18 March
· 1850-3
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Finance History | American Express — Three Rival Lines Signed at Buffalo on 18 March
kevin
People treat American Express as the tower at 200 Vesey Street that always ran a charge card and a travelers cheque from an S and P 500 book.
The first book was an express merger on the Erie Canal.
On 18 March 1850 Henry Wells, William G. Fargo, and John Butterfield signed the Articles of Association that folded three competing New York State express houses into one unincorporated company.
Wells and Company, Livingston, Fargo and Company, and Butterfield and Wasson had been cutting prices on the Albany-to-Buffalo run.
The merger stopped the rate war.
Wells became president.
Fargo became secretary.
Offices sat on Main Street next to Buffalo's Central Wharf, where canal cargo met the lake boats, and on Wall Street in lower Manhattan, where the Hudson steamers loaded.
The mechanism was shared capacity.
One messenger could carry several clients' parcels, specie, and papers on the same railroad car, which made a small package cheaper than a dedicated courier.
By the Civil War the association listed hundreds of offices across the Midwest.
A travelers cheque arrived in 1891 under James C. Fargo, after the money order of 1882.
The charge card and the travel agency are twentieth-century books on that same trust in a piece of paper that moved faster than coin.
When Butterfield later blocked a California extension, Wells and Fargo opened a separate Pacific company in 1852.
The two names still sit on different S and P 500 lines.
A canal-head merger in Buffalo is why a payments company founded as freight still carries the word Express.
Photo: Buffalo, New York, the city of the 1850 articles, via Wikimedia Commons.
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