Coles Express Inc.
Here is a link with the entire story for Coles Express, Bangor, Maine.
From 1995
Coles Express Inc. -- Company History
Address:
P.O. Box 918
Bangor, Maine 04401
U.S.A.
Statistics:
Wholly Owned Division of Roadway Services, Inc.
Incorporated: 1917
Employees: 400
Sales: $41 million
Company History:
Coles Express Inc. is a comprehensive motor transportation and trucking service operating in the New England region of the United States. The company was purchased by Roadway Services in 1993, as a part of that company's efforts at geographic and service expansion through acquisition. In 1995, Coles Express was providing trucking services throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and along the Atlantic Coast of Canada.
The company was founded in 1917 by Allie Cole. Cole had left his home in Lowell, Maine, at the age of ten, realizing that his widowed mother could not support him and his several sisters and brothers on her washer-woman salary. Cole found employment as a farm hand, a stable boy, and, in 1910 when he was 17, as a baggage and freight handler at the Enfield, Maine, railroad station. According to Galen Cole's Allie Cole: A Maine Pioneer, one day Cole found himself helping a businessman lower a 600-pound load from the dock of the railroad to a horse-drawn wagon. Since this was against the normal operating rules of the railroad, the young man was harshly reprimanded. Bristling at the rebuke, and especially irritated at the railroad's attitude of not encouraging good customer treatment, Cole decided to quit his job and start his own company.
An opportunity presented itself when the U.S. Mail contract offered a bid for delivery between the railroad station at Enfield and the adjacent towns of Burlington, Lowell, Saponac, and Grand Falls. Cole won the contract and established his own firm, Coles Express. The new business venture blossomed, and by 1919 Cole had made enough money to purchase a Model T Ford for the delivery of mail and other packages. This modernization greatly impressed his customers since the delivery time was reduced to a fraction of what it took using horse transportation.
Coles Express Inc. -- Company History