The first reliable and extensive express service, however, does date
from 1839. In that year, William F. Harnden grasped the need for, and
chance of profit in, the delivery of valuable parcels between Boston and
New York and to that end made a contract for his personal transportation
on the Boston and Providence Railroad--the first express contract in the
United States. Harnden made four trips weekly, by rail to Providence and
thence to New York by boat; and carried the expressed articles in a hand
satchel. But within several months the business outgrew that humble
forerunner of the modern express car, and he was compelled to hire
additional express messengers, to set up offices, and to arrange for
special space on trains.
So successful was Harnden's venture and so serviceable that he soon
found himself confronted by many imitators and competitors. In 1840,
Alvin Adams entered the New England-New York field, thus becoming the
founder of the present Adams Express Company; and later in the same year
Harnden extended his business to Philadelphia. In the following year,
Henry Wells and a partner established an express service between Albany
and Buffalo. By 1845 express companies had sprung up on every hand. In
the latter year Wells and William G. Fargo developed a company to cover
territory, much of it railroadless, west of Buffalo; and very soon this
service reached Chicago. Early in the fifties Wells and Fargo were
delivering in California by the stage coach and pony express of song and
story and motion picture, although it was not until 1869 that the first
transcontinental railroad was completed. (The pre-occupation of the
present Wells-Fargo Express Company with the western field is thus not
fortuitous.) And by the early fifties also Adams and Company was
beginning to tap the South.