Background
Henry Wells was born at Thetford, Vt. , the son of Shipley Wells, a Presbyterian clergyman who early removed to central New York.
Henry Wells was born at Thetford, Vt. , the son of Shipley Wells, a Presbyterian clergyman who early removed to central New York.
The boy worked on a farm and attended school at Fayette.
At sixteen he was apprenticed to Jessup & Palmer, tanners and shoemakers at Palmyra. About 1841 he became agent at Albany for Harnden's express between New York and Albany. In two years he had established Livingston, Wells & Pomeroy's, operating between Albany and Buffalo, and was himself messenger, making a weekly trip on five or six railroads and two stage lines. The company soon abandoned paying two regular fares for transporting messenger and trunk and arranged a kind of commutation, the forerunner of the present intimate relations between railroads and express companies. He carried mail at six cents for a single letter or one dollar for twenty while the government charged from two to four times as much. With James W. Hale, he offered a through service from New York, Boston, and Bangor, Me. , vigorously opposed by the post office. The expressmen had the benefit of popular support, roused by penny postage in England, and the government was forced to pass the five-cent postage act of 1845. In 1844 he opened the line between Buffalo and Detroit, Wells & Company, with William G. Fargo as messenger. The service, using lake steamers in summer and wagons and stages in winter, rapidly expanded to Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. In 1846 he sold his interest in the western service and removed from Buffalo to New York to handle the eastern business, now connected with New York and opening offices in London and Paris. In 1850 competition on the route between Albany and Buffalo led to the merger of the three companies, Wells & Company, Butterfield, Wasson & Company, and Livingston, Fargo & Company, into the American Express Company. Wells was president for eighteen years. About this time he removed to Aurora, N. Y. In 1852, with associates, he organized in New York, Wells, Fargo & Company for business to California. The president was Edwin B. Morgan, his fellow citizen of Aurora. The usual route to the Pacific coast was by steamship by way of Panama. Adams & Company were already well entrenched in California. The new company began by buying small, independent express lines, and it found its opportunity in the troubled days of 1885, when Adams & Company failed. In 1857 the California service and the business east of the Missouri were linked by the award of the contract for the overland mail to John Butterfield, who represented the Wells, Fargo interests. The Wells, Fargo interests also took over the pony express for the last months of its service, which was ended by the completion of the telegraph in October 1861. With its overland connections well established, the company prospered until the completion of the transcontinental railroad changed much of the business. In 1868 the Pacific Union Express Company appeared with an exclusive ten-year contract with the railroad and forced Wells, Fargo to expand its capitalization and absorb this company. Similarly, east of the Missouri River, the Merchants Union Express Company was fighting the American Express Company. In 1868 the American and the Merchants Union companies united under the name of American Merchants Union Express Company, after 1873 the American Express Company. At the time of this consolidation Wells retired as president. For the last ten years of his life he traveled a good deal. At his home in Aurora he was president of the First National Bank and first president of the Cayuga Lake Railroad. In 1868 he founded Wells Seminary, now Wells College. He established schools for stammerers in several cities, presumably because he, himself, suffered from an impediment of speech. He died in Glasgow, Scotland, and was buried in Aurora. From his thirty-fifth to his sixty-fifth year he saw the country grow rapidly and the carrying trades grow equally. In 1841 carrying the express from Albany to Buffalo was almost within the capacity of one man and in 1870 the great American Express Company operated over railroads as far as the Missouri River. The newly opening far West was a fresh opportunity; and in 1871 the country already supported a regular overland stage and mail route. Though his earlier outlook had anticipated expansion toward Europe, he was able to sense his opportunity in the far West of his own country, and he adapted his business to the spread of population over the continent. Something of his own view of the development of the express business can be found in papers he read before the Buffalo Historical Society in June 1863, The American Express in its Relation to . Buffalo (1864) and before the American Geographical and Statistical Society of Albany on Feburary 4, 1864, Sketch of the Rise, Progress, and Present Conduct of the Express System (1864).
He married Sarah Daggett, who died in Albany on October 13, 1859. In 1861 he married, as his second wife, Mary, the daughter of Henry Prentice of Boston.