American Express Co. signed by Henry Wells and W.G. Fargo - 1865 or 1866 dated Express Autograph Stock Certificate

Stock signed by Henry Wells as president and Wm. G. Fargo as secretary. Some with 5 cents revenue stamp. Exceptionally Nice! Please specify color.

Henry Wells (December 12, 1805 – December 10, 1878) merged 3 older companies to form American Express and became its President from 1850-68. In 1852 he organized Wells, Fargo & Co. He retired in 1868. In the same year, he founded Wells Seminary, the present Wells College. He was an American businessman important in the history of both the American Express Company and Wells Fargo & Company. Wells worked as a freight agent before joining the express business. His companies, which were the predecessors of American Express and Wells Fargo, competed with the United States Post Office by carrying mail at less than the government rate. In higher education, Wells was the founder of Wells College in Aurora, New York. Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wells

William George Fargo (1818-1881) Fargo, a pioneer American expressman, was born in Pompey, New York. From the age of thirteen he had to support himself, obtaining little schooling, and for several years he was a clerk in grocery stores in Syracuse. He became a freight agent for the Auburn & Syracuse railway company at Auburn in 1841, an express messenger between Albany and Buffalo a year later, and in 1843 a resident agent in Buffalo. In 1844 he organized, with Henry Wells (1805-1878) and Daniel Dunning, the first express company (Wells & Co.; after 1845 Livingston & Fargo) to engage in the carrying business west of Buffalo. The lines of this company (which first operated only to Detroit, via Cleveland) were rapidly extended to Chicago, St. Louis, and other western points. In March 1850, when through a consolidation of competing lines the American Express Company was organized, Wells became president and Fargo secretary. In 1851, with Wells and others, he organized the firm of Wells, Fargo & Company to conduct an express business between New York and San Francisco by way of the Isthmus of Panama and on the Pacific coast, where it long had a virtual monopoly. In 1861 Wells, Fargo & Co. bought and reorganized the Overland Mail Co., which had been formed in 1857 to carry the United States mails, and of which Fargo had been one of the original promoters. From 1862 to 1866 he was mayor of Buffalo, and from 1868 to his death in Buffalo, he was president of the American Express Company, with which in 1868 the Merchants Union Express Co. was consolidated. He was a director of the New York Central and of the Northern Pacific railways. Fargo Avenue in Buffalo, and Fargo, North Dakota are named after him.

The American Express Company (Amex) is a multinational financial services corporation headquartered at 200 Vesey Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. The company was founded in 1850 and is one of the 30 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company's logo, adopted in 1958, is a gladiator or centurion whose image appears on the company's well-known traveler's cheques, charge cards, and credit cards. Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Express

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