Benjamin Pierce Cheney

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Benjamin Pierce Cheney (August 12, 1815 – July 23, 1895) was an American businessman, and a founder of the firm that became American Express. The surname is pronounced ['tʃi:ni].

Cheney was born in Hillsborough, New Hampshire to a blacksmith. At age 16, he started work as a a stage-coach driver between Nashua and Keene. Five years later he had become a stage agent in Boston and soon organized an express between Boston and Montreal. He later consolidated that stage-coach line with others to form the United States and Canada Express Company,[1] which 37 years later he merged with American Express,[2] at which time he became the firm's largest shareholder.

Cheney endowed a professorship at Dartmouth College, commissioned a bronze statue of his friend Daniel Webster, which is located in front of the New Hampshire State House,[1] and helped develop the eastern part of Washington state with a railroad. As a result, Cheney, Washington, is named in his honor,[1] and he helped establish a school there that evolved into Eastern Washington University.

He married Elizabeth Stickney Clapp, and had children Benjamin Pierce Cheney, Alice Cheney, Mary Cheney, and Elizabeth Cheney. He amassed a fortune estimated at $10,000,000.[2]

Cheney's estate in Wellesley, Massachusetts has since become the Elm Bank Horticulture Center.

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c Pope, Charles Henry. The Cheney Genealogy. Charles H. Pope (1897), pp. 505-08.
  2. ^ a b Harrison, Mitchell C. Prominent and Progressive Americans: An Encyclopædia of Contemporaneous Biography. New York Tribune (1902), p. 55.