In 1906, Ed Austin began hauling freight with a team of horses and an iron-wheeled wagon in Lynden, Washington. Austin named his company Lynden Transfer after the town. Lynden is about five miles south of the U.S.-Canada, and its population at that time was fewer than 1,150 people.
Twenty years later, in 1926, Austin purchased his first truck to haul cargo from Lynden to Seattle, a distance of about 105 miles and a journey that would take several hours because of the state of the roads at that...