The Wells Fargo Corporate Archives maintains an extensive collection of records with enduring historical value and serves as our company’s core corporate memory.
Included in the collection are books that have important value for researchers and family genealogists. The Wells Fargo Corporate Archives has made selections from the collection available for download.
Between 1871 and 1882, Wells Fargo published several bilingual publications to facilitate commerce with Chinese speaking business owners along the Pacific Coast.
This 1882 edition is notable as it was produced by Wells Fargo the same year that Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Starting in the 1870s, Wells Fargo regularly published directories that listed the location of its offices and the name of the agent in charge.
This 1890 edition offers researchers an important tool in tracking people of the past given the destruction of most of the U.S. Census records for that year.
The telegraph offered quick but unsecured communication. Wells Fargo encrypted messages using substitute words that could only be understood using a cipher book.
In the 1910s, Wells Fargo published this cipher book as a special courtesy for its traveling customers.
