When Edwin Barber Morgan resigned as president of Wells Fargo & Company on November 26, 1853, Barney was elected to succeed him.
Besides serving as president and a director of Wells Fargo, Barney was also a director of John Butterfield's Overland Mail Company, organized in 1857 to provide government mail coach service from Tipton, Missouri, to San Francisco, California, by way of El Paso, Texas, and Yuma, Arizona.
[4] On April 15, 1863, Danford Barney, Benjamin Pierce Cheney and William Fargo were appointed a committee in New York to go to California "in the best interests of the company".
Barney and his second wife were the parents of three more children:[13] After the death of Azubah's father in 1868, she purchased the Latham family home in North Thetford, Vermont.
[21][22] Through his daughter Belle, he was a grandfather of Mary Latham Gurnee (1880–1968),[23] who married (and widowed) three times: first to Francis L. V. Hoppin, a prominent architect and artist;[24] second to Alfred Hudson Townley in 1949 (former Justice of the First Judicial Department in New York and widower of Martha Depew Strang, niece of U.S.
Senator Chauncey Depew);[25] and, after his death in 1954,[26] Cyril Barthurst Judge,[27] past president of the Newport Country Club, in 1963.