Finance History | Central Wharf, Buffalo — Three Express Houses Signed a Ten-Year Pact

People treat American Express as a Manhattan card issuer and a tower on Vesey Street.

The articles that created the company were signed in Buffalo.

On 18 March 1850 Henry Wells, William G. Fargo and John Butterfield consolidated Wells and Company, Livingston, Fargo and Company, and Butterfield, Wasson and Company into a joint-stock express named the American Express Company.

The company's own archive still holds the handwritten articles. The pact was written to run ten years from 1 January 1850 unless dissolved sooner.

Buffalo sat at the lake end of the Erie Canal. Express chests moved from New York steamers onto canal boats and lake packets here.

Wells had already kept offices at 1 Exchange Street. A 2025 historic marker at the reconstructed Central Wharf states that Wells and Fargo began American Express near these docks, with offices on Main Street beside the wharf.

The first New York rooms were at 10 Wall Street. The marble depot at Hudson and Jay came later, in 1858.

The mechanism on this waterfront is pooled routes.

Three rival expresses stopped cutting each other's rates on the same New York-to-Buffalo line and sold space in one another's wagons. Coin, bank bills and checks rode with the dry goods because the same lockbox could carry both.

Wells and Fargo founded Wells, Fargo and Company in 1852 after other American Express directors refused a California extension. That is a different firm and a different pin.

The wooden wharf is gone. Canalside is the public reconstruction on the historic slip. The pin is the water's edge, not a vanished counting room.

Photo: André Carrotflower, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Canalside on the Buffalo riverfront, 2019.