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My colleague Marianne Babal is a VIP in the Public History world  (scroll down a little). A friend of hers teaches at The College of William & Mary  in Williamsburg, Virginia, and earlier this year his/her students found a treasure trove.

In an attic (totally by chance!), they found records  related to Maggie L. Walker.  Walker was the first woman to charter a bank in the United States, and one of few women bank presidents.

Her story led us to include her in our exhibit in San Francisco, "Women Making Financial History."

Maggie Walker  lived in Richmond, Virginia, where she raised a family as well as involving herself with civic activities. She was active in the Grand Order of St. Luke, later renamed the Independent Order of St. Luke. The Order was a benevolent organization , many of which existed in the 19th century (and today) to aid members with education, insurance, recreation, charity, dispute resolution and friendship. In 1899, Mrs. Walker became the leader of the organization, and her business skills helped the Order to prosper.

Walker's ambition was to found a financial institution by and for African Americans. In 1903, she organized the St. Luke's Penny Savings Bank , which loaned to black businesses, students and homebuyers. Assets grew, and Walker's bank was able to survive the Great Depression — legend has it the bank was one of the few banks that did not close during the "Bank Holiday" in 1933.  Her bank survives today as Consolidated Bank and Trust. 

Maggie Lena Walker  was someone who made history without necessarily trying to. She went to work and did everything she could to make her ideas become realities. She did it, and developed a community for women and for African American in the middle of Jim Crow. She provided financial services — bank accounts, investment services and loans — for people who might not have had other options. Her home is now a National Historic Site , rightly so.

But it's additional honor to her that we all keep her history current, by recognizing her hard work, and the positive impact she had on her community.

Biographies mention Mrs. Walker was a great and inspirational speaker. The lady had it all!

Megan

Thanksgiving is almost here, and I've finally finished readying my yard for winter : I raked leaves, put away the grill, and pulled out the remnants of my garden – like my tomato plants. 

I had been feasting off homegrown tomatoes all summer, making salsas and salads and eating them straight from the plant. And while some folks can tomatoes  come fall, that's something I've never done. My husband is decidedly anti-canned produce. I tell him he never would have survived 100 years ago.

But it turns out that is not entirely true.

Wells Fargo was shipping fresh produce around the country more than 100 years ago. As the first express company to begin using refrigerated railroad cars, Wells Fargo was soon shipping crops like tomatoes, peaches, and oranges across the country. In 1901, one grower from Hayward, California, was shipping asparagus, cherries, currants, gooseberries, and strawberry rhubarb to many locations including Salt Lake City, Utah, Boston, Massachusetts, and St. Paul, Minnesota.

By 1913, 150 Wells Fargo refrigerator cars were speeding delicate western fruits and vegetables to eastern consuming cities. Most of the produce originated in California but later, Wells Fargo shipped fruits and vegetables (like tomatoes!) from Mexico across the United States.

So, while I am enjoying my homemade tabouli  and margarita pizza this winter, I will remember Wells Fargo's refrigerated rail cars and be thankful I am not limited to eating canned green beans.

Ileana

When was the last time you lost $2,150? And because of a hole—not in your pocket, but in your stocking!

The Wells Fargo History Museum in San Francisco recently opened a new exhibit, "Women Making Financial History." It interprets the many different roles women have played and are playing in the financial world: as bankers, as customers, as pioneers; even as images on currency. If you’re in town, I’d definitely recommend you check it out.

(But until then, take a look at the mini-site about the exhibit, sort of a "sneak preview.")

One of the interesting stories on the site is one about how banks in the early 20th century accommodated the needs of their female customers. For hundreds of years women had typically been financially dependent on their husbands or family. It was in the late 19th century that a large number of women began to join the workforce, and therefore, gain economic power. Banks took notice, and they realized that women were a different type of customer. They needed and wanted to be treated differently.

Maybe even have a separate room to do their banking. I know, it sounds bad, right? But the reason is that many women didn’t trust banks. They had for years carried their valuables and money in their stockings or underneath their blouses. Imagine just how uncomfortable it would be, going to make a deposit and having to dig for your money in front of all the male bankers and the other customers! And, at a time when female propriety was often scrutinized, this wouldn’t be very ladylike.

But as Mrs. Shore found out when she lost $2,150 worth of jewels, through a hole in her stocking, it wasn’t the safest place for keeping valuables. Maybe a bank, with a little privacy, was less inconvenient than risky hosiery. Banks "got it" — the "stocking room" was created. Here was a special room, just for the ladies, where they could do their banking. And of course, ready their deposits in private.

Creation of the stocking room shows an interesting paradox: banks treated women differently on account of their sex, as society has for thousands of years. BUT, it also shows that society was beginning to value and better understand women’s economic importance. Banks were doing what they had to to gain women’s trust, and women's business.

To me, the stocking room shows an interesting shift. Though it physically separated the sexes, its intention, strangely enough, was a step towards gender equality: women were being recognized for their financial power, and were being encouraged to join the banking world.

As a modern woman, I’m not sure how I feel about the need for a separate room to do my banking just because I’m female. But then, I don’t wear stockings full of jewels!

Charles

In association with the International Museum of Women (IMOW) , the Wells Fargo History Museum in San Francisco has opened its latest exhibit, "Women Making Financial History." This exhibit examines women's roles in making and managing money, from the early history of the United States to today — all around the world.

The exhibit features striking photo essays of women benefitting from micro-lending in Nepal, new entrepreneurship of Arab women in Qatar, and more. The original material is from IMOW's virtual exhibition, "Economica,"  which explores the many facets of women's experiences of and contributions in the global economy.

"Women Making Financial History" introduces women who came West to make their fortunes, and build businesses and communities. It shows female Wells Fargo agents who provided financial services across the frontier, and remarkable woman pioneers in banking. You can enter a money vault to view historic coins and currency featuring women. You can experience banking in the 1920s inside our recreated bank Women's Department, and see vintage bank advertisements focused on women customers.

The first woman to be portrayed on U.S. currency was Martha Washington, the first First Lady of the United States. She was featured on an 1891 One Dollar Silver Certificate, which were exchanged for silver coins from 1878 to 1964. (It is still legal tender, too.) In the Museum, you can take photos and print your mug on vintage style bills, and take them home with you. (Look serious or silly — your choice!)

Find out what it was really like to work in a bank a long time ago, as you try your hand on our 1895 check cutter. See other machines that men and women bankers would have used back then. You can talk to a friend on two old-fashioned candlestick telephones. No speed dialing, though.

Ever heard of a "Stocking Room"? There was a time in the early 1900s when women didn't feel comfortable entering the very masculine environment of banks, and even avoided having bank accounts. Some women tucked their money and valuables in their stockings instead, under their floor-length skirts.

In order to gain these women for customers, banks came up with the Stocking Room — a Women's Department. This was a safe haven where ladies could remove their cash and do their banking without the distraction of men, cigars and spittoons.

Women Making Financial History will run through spring 2010, and can be seen at:

The Wells Fargo History Museum
420 Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA

Admission to the Museum is free. Hours are 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, closed weekends and bank holidays.

More information can be found at our Wells Fargo Historical Services website! Just click on "New Online Exhibit: Women Making Financial History."

Phyllis

...and they will come.... 

Minnesota may not be the center of the world in many respects, but the world certainly comes to visit us. Over a span of just two days, the Wells Fargo History Museum in Minnesota had visitors from six different countries.*

First was a group of visitors from Iceland , who were on a trip tracing the paths of emigrants  from Iceland to the United States. They were followed by a research scientist from Scotland, who came back the next day to show us photographs of the museum that he'd created in his village to document their local history. Next were families from France and Australia.

Then a couple from Wales asked me, "What does Wells Fargo do now that they're not an express company?”

And finally, a couple from Mexico visited us – they were in town for the Twin Cities Marathon. 

I love our local visitors — our team members and school children — but there's just something special about hosting international visitors. Our roots may be deep in Minnesota soil, but it's nice to know that we branch out all over the world.

*You could say seven different countries — if you count the Packers fans  visiting from Wisconsin!

Charles

Joycee Wong is Curator at Wells Fargo's San Francisco History Museum. (Her previous blog is here!) For Hispanic Heritage Month, Joycee reflects on the common sense we all have of celebrating family and life, whether we hail from Oaxaca or Hong Kong. (CR)

Recently, I went to the memorial park to pay respects to my dearest mom on the 4th anniversary of her death, lugging 2 large handle bags. In them were some flowers and vases, a thermos of tea and a freshly made scone, a camera (to capture the visit and share with out-of-town family later), a few old letters (to reminisce) and some tissues (for the inevitable tears). All this was my paraphernalia for a visitation to my mother's columbarium where her ashes are kept in a peaceful sanctuary.

I am reminded of the similarities between cultures when I saw a flyer a few days earlier about "Day of the Dead"  celebrations that will take place this month among many Hispanic families.

If you've never heard of it, "Day of the Dead" (El Día de los Muertos)  isn't some macabre Halloween game, but a time-honored tradition going back almost 3000 years. This holiday focuses on gatherings of families and friends, for prayer and to remember friends and family who have died. Traditions include building private altars, making sugar skulls, displaying marigolds and serving the favorite foods and beverages of the departed. Everyone visits graves with these gifts.

As a Chinese-American, I grew up with light touches of traditions on the multitude of Chinese holidays and celebrations, including those honoring our deceased loved ones. Growing up in Hong Kong, I remember periodic excursions to the cemetery where my parents and sisters — saddled with armloads of food, flowers, and cleaning supplies — spent a few hours with my paternal grandmother who was buried there. Honoring the dead according to Chinese customs require certain rituals, which our family followed to some degree....

Ileana

Picture this: It's 1886, you're a restaurant owner in Aguascalientes, Mexico, and you need a new refrigerator. (Yes, they had them! Not your Frigidaire  or anything, but they had them.) You would especially like one of the latest, most efficient models, but can't find one anywhere. What do you do?

Wells Fargo has you covered.

We're currently celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, and I found it the perfect time to share one of my favorite artifacts at our L.A. museum. We call it the Guia. The whole name is quite a mouthful: "The "Guide for the Department of Sales and Commissions of Wells Fargo: Where and How to Buy American-Manufactured Items." This Spanish-language guide was printed in 1886, and it's basically a guide Mexican consumers and business owners could use to purchase a variety of items from the U.S. Wells Fargo had many offices in Mexico and would ship all over the country. The company had guides like this handy for customers. Agents would have samples of products and prices, and they took orders.

The introduction to the guide states that gone are the days of "taking advantage of friends and acquaintances who travel" by asking them to get you so-and-so item during their visit abroad (I think many of us are occasionally guilty of this even today, though) or entrusting such orders to strangers.

Wells Fargo's Express was easier, faster and more reliable. You just placed your order at an office, and you could get American-made items delivered to you from hundreds of miles away!

The items offered in the Guia were ones that were difficult to find or not found at all in Mexican markets. Making it convenient for people to order all sorts of items certainly helped the development of modern commerce in Mexico.

This guide is definitely a fun "read." It has any kind of item you can think of: shoes, carriages, farming equipment, dentist tools, cookies, music boxes, dried coconut...you name it!

And yes, refrigerators.

Charles

It's that time of year again! We haul out the decorations, start addressing cards to loved ones, plan get-togethers...Yes, it's Hispanic Heritage Month , one of my favorite times of the year.

These past couple years here at GBH, we've reflected on Salvadoran heritage, famous customers and a memorable team member. We got a well-timed visit from a norteño band. Hispanic business has certainly a part of Wells Fargo's success. Latino customers transact business, and Latino team members provide customer service.

Wells Fargo's Express network moved from east to Golden West via Panama.  Wells Fargo had agents in Panama to assist pioneers in their journey to the Gold Rush. In January 1853, Henry Wells traveled by sea to San Francisco, to assess the business.

From Panama, he wrote, "I am alive & kicking but awful sore & some tired. I have found our Agents the very best men on the entire route — men of the highest standards & great energy."

In North America, Overland stagecoaches rolled through territories that had been northernmost Mexico only a few years earlier. Colorado House was opened in Old Town San Diego in 1852 and housed the Wells Fargo Express office. Jose Guadalupe Estudillo, scion of an old Californio  family, became Wells Fargo Agent in 1870.

In Wells Fargo's early years, gold and other important business were carried by side-wheel steamships from the Columbia River basin to points in Latin America. The steamers called at Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlan and Acapulco, where Wells Fargo agents served the growing Pacific Coast communities.

Wells Fargo established a Mexican subsidiary in 1860, Wells Fargo y Compañía Express, S.A. (Sociedad Mexicana). Offices were opened in grocery and department stores, hotels, drug stores and real estate offices.

Wells Fargo's business in Mexico (pdf) grew with the expansion of railroads in the last half of the 19th century. Wells Fargo provided rapid delivery and was the only U.S. express company offering direct service. By the turn of the century, la Compañía had over 300 offices, and fully ninety-eight percent of employees were Mexican.

Wells Fargo's first General Agent in El Salvador was J.C. Ybarra (pdf) in 1913. He oversaw thirteen agents and their offices, five messengers and seven other workers. Ybarra was an eyewitness to Wells Fargo's role in the economic stability of that era. He wrote that he and his staff had the "honor of being employees of a Company which has enlarged, in the commercial history of the New World, the era of progress and prosperity." In Cuba, (pdf) Wells Fargo had regularly scheduled business via steamships since the late 1800s. Wells Fargo handled money orders and traveler's checks for Cubans and tourists, and expanded steamship services to various destinations from the island.

We all personally celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month because we Historians are keenly aware that Hispanics have been a critical part of Wells Fargo's presence since the very beginning.

Charles

Amanda Hopper is an interpreter at the Old Sacramento History Museum, where she presents Wells Fargo's history to visitors. This is her second post for Guided by History. (CR)

A few days ago I was looking in a box on our desk that is filled with index cards   that explain all the items in our museum. One card refers to a photograph of a man leaning against a pile of silver bars in our "safe room.". The caption to the image reads: "In 1877, Madison Larkin guarded silver from Arizona's Tip Top  Mine."

The index card for the image reads, "Larkin's tenure as Wells Fargo Agent was fairly short but dramatic. He is the bold, alert fellow with the double-barrel shotgun cradled in his left arm; often pictured guarding a Wells Fargo treasure box and a huge pile of silver bullion." The information comes from the book Wells Fargo in Arizona Territory  by John and Lillian Theobald. (Tempe, Ariz. 1978)

This card really sparked my interest. I wanted to know what happened to Madison Larkin. Was he killed? What was so dramatic about his time with Wells Fargo?

I began looking through all the books in our "cave" (our nickname for the backroom) and searched the blog to see if anyone had written about him. I asked Martha, who works with me here, if she knew anything about him. (Martha is the one who made all the index cards in the first place — plus, she knows EVERYTHING.)

After a little searching, she was able to answer all my questions about Mr. Larkin....

Charles

Anonymous left this comment on my Lewis and Clark piece last week:

I was interested in the books you were reading. How about creating an on-going list of "What the WF Historians are Reading"? Could be useful for those with long commutes to/from work. Thanks.

First off, I invite everyone to tell us what's on your reading list. Let us know why they're good or bad.

That said, here you go, Anonymous:

Phyllis in Minneapolis

• Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California by Frances Dinkelspiel. Interesting, if sometimes too tightly focused.
• The Confusion: The Baroque Cycle Volume Two  by Neal Stephenson. An "historical-sci-fi-epic-pirate-comedy-punk-love-story." Stephenson is one of my fave authors.
• Hard Road West, History and Geography along the Gold Rush Trail  by Keith Heyer Meldahl. Just finished this. Fabulously readable historical science — loved it!
• The War of the World, Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West  by Niall Ferguson. Stalled in the middle of this stunningly good scholarship, but Holy I-Need-Anti-Depressants-Now, Batman!
• The Journal of Wong Ming-Chung, A Chinese Miner in California, 1852  by Laurence Yep. Looking forward to this young adult book. I heard from a visitor that it references Wells Fargo, so I've got to check it out.

Steve in Portland
(Currently reading on the MAX  to and from work.)

• "Ho for California! Women's Overland Diaries" from the Huntington Library , edited by Sandra L. Myres. From "Museums and Schools" Journal of Museum Education, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring 2009)

Glen in San Francisco

• The Victorian Internet  by Tom Standage. A fascinating comparison between the invention of the telegraph and the internet. A good, light read.

Allan in San Diego

• Returning to Earth  by Jim Harrison. Recently finished this historical fiction of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, told from four perspectives in a mixed race family, whose patriarch is dying. One of Harrison's best.
• Strangers in a Stolen Land  by Richard Carrico. Just started this story about the Indians of San Diego County.

Casey in San Diego

• Historic Resource Study: Pony Express National Historic Trail  by Anthony Godfrey, Ph.D., for the National Park Service. A little dry, but a good overview of the founding and running of the Pony Express. Includes biographies of William Russell, Alexander Majors and William Waddell, founders of the California Overland Mail Company & Pikes Peak Express (a.k.a. the Pony Express).
• A New Look at Wells Fargo, Stagecoaches and the Pony Express  by W. Turrentine Jackson. More pamphlet than book, it is a well-written defense of Wells Fargo's role in western stagecoaching and the Pony Express.
• Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express  by Christopher Corbett. Love it! This book is a great history of the Pony Express. The author uses many different sources and presents many different sides to the stories and legends that have been built around the Pony Express. The book is written with a sense of humor and without stuffy "historian speak."
• A Thrilling and Truthful History of the Pony Express: With Other Sketches and Incidents of Those Stirring Times  by William Lightfoot Visscher.
• Pony Express Versus Wells Fargo Express, or Hoof Prints That Can Not Be Eroded By Time  by Waddell F. Smith. A counter-argument to Jackson.
• The City of the Saints; And, Across the Rocky Mountains to California  by Sir Richard Burton, a stage rider along the Pony Express route and documenter of Salt Lake City and the Mormons.
• Seventy Years on the Frontier  by Alexander Majors, co-founder of the Pony Express.

Tom in Anchorage

• Fifty Miles from Tomorrow  by William L. Iggiagruk Hensley. Willie Hensley grew up on the shores of the Bering Sea, at a crossroads between ancient and modern ways of life. His descriptions of hardships — living under 9 months of winter, the severity of accultration, and the transformation of a territory into a state — are enlightening at the very least.
• Physics for the Rest of Us  by Roger S. Jones. Exploring ways to describe time and relationships in nature, to young people, led me to this wonderful book. It is filled with great explainations most anyone can understand.

Juan in Los Angeles

• Pony Express: The Great Gamble  by Roy S. Bloss. Getting caught up on the PX before next tear's sesquicentennial.

Bev in San Francisco

• The Great Influenza  by John Barry. Thought I would get ready for fall flu season by re-reading this one. The book is great: Who knew the history of a flu epidemic could be so thoughtful and intriguing?

Bill in San Francisco

• American Made: The Enduring Legacy of the W.P.A. , by Nick Taylor. Although definitely favorable to FDR and the New Deal, there are some interesting parallels to current events here.

Amanda in Phoenix

• 1491: New Revolutions of the Americas before Columbus  by Charles Mann. Currently reading. It is a few years old and has been on my reading list since it first came out. Very interesting insight into the lives and cultures of native peoples.
• Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War  by Tony Horwitz. I recently finished this one, which I thought was a truly unique look into Southern Civil War culture.

There you have it, Anonymous. You asked, you got!