Fort Wayne, Indiana

Fort Wayne is a city in northeastern Indiana, the county seat of Allen County, standing where the St. Joseph and St. Marys rivers meet to form the Maumee. With 263,886 people at the 2020 census it is the second-largest city in Indiana. Its history runs in a clear line from the geography: a short portage between the Maumee and the Wabash made this ground a crossroads for the Miami, then for French, British and American soldiers, then for canal boats, railroads and factories.

Beginnings

The Miami town of Kekionga stood at the confluence long before any fort carried an American name. It was the Miami capital — not one town but a cluster of villages — and by the 1790s refugee Delaware and Shawnee villages stood alongside it. A census of 1744 counted about 40 Frenchmen and 1,000 Miami living there. Little Turtle, the Miami war leader, called the place “that glorious gate… through which all the good words of our chiefs had to pass from north to south and from east to west,” and the geography explains him: west of the confluence a portage of a few miles reached the Wabash system, so a traveller could pass between Lake Erie and the Mississippi and the Gulf without leaving the water for long.

France planted a post here first — Fort Miami, in place by the early 1700s and later rebuilt as Fort St. Philippe. Britain took the post in 1760, during the French and Indian War, and the Miami took it back in 1763, in Pontiac’s War. After American independence the United States tried to take the Maumee country by force and failed twice. In October 1790, Little Turtle’s forces mauled General Josiah Harmar’s 1,453-man expedition in a series of fights around Kekionga, inflicting more than 200 American casualties. A year later, on 4 November 1791, a confederacy under Little Turtle, Blue Jacket and Buckongahelas destroyed General Arthur St. Clair’s army near present-day Fort Recovery, Ohio — the worst defeat the United States Army ever suffered at Native hands, and the disaster that brought Congress’s first investigation of the executive branch.

The third American army succeeded. General Anthony Wayne’s Legion of the United States defeated the confederacy at Fallen Timbers, on the Maumee near present-day Toledo, on 20 August 1794. Wayne reached Kekionga in mid-September and built his fort across the Maumee from the village. On 22 October 1794 — the fourth anniversary of Harmar’s defeat — Colonel Jean François Hamtramck dedicated and named Fort Wayne, with fifteen cannon rounds for the fifteen states. The city still keeps 22 October 1794 as its founding date. The Treaty of Greenville followed on 3 August 1795: twelve tribes ceded most of Ohio and key tracts that included the Fort Wayne portage.

The fort remained a border post for a generation. Little Turtle, a Greenville signatory, died on 14 July 1812 at the home of his son-in-law William Wells, the U.S. Indian agent here, and was buried with American military honours. Two months later, in September 1812, some 500 Potawatomi and Miami under Winamac and Five Medals besieged the fort’s garrison of about 100 men for a week; only two soldiers were killed, and William Henry Harrison relieved the post on 12 September.

Meanwhile the land itself was being signed away. Jean Baptiste de Richardville — Pinšiwa, chief of the Miami, a negotiator at treaty after treaty from Greenville in 1795 to 1840 — gathered 28,320 acres and $31,800 in treaty grants along the way. In 1827 he built his house at what is now 5705 Bluffton Road, with $600 of federal treaty money and about $1,600 of his own: the first Greek Revival house in northeastern Indiana, and a National Historic Landmark today. The treaties of 1809, 1818, 1826, 1838 and 1840 ceded the Miami country piece by piece, canal rights-of-way included. The end came in October 1846, when the Army and its contractors loaded hundreds of Myaamia onto canal boats at Peru and at Fort Wayne and sent them west — five boats to Cincinnati, a steamboat onward, and the party reaching Sugar Creek in Kansas on 5 November 1846, with several dying on the way. A few families — Richardville’s, Godfroy’s, Meshingomesia’s, Slocum’s and LaFontaine’s — held treaty exemptions and stayed.

The town rose as the garrison faded. The Army withdrew in 1819 and a federal land office followed. Fort Wayne was platted in 1823, Allen County was organised in 1824, the settlement incorporated as a town in 1829 with about 300 people, and on 22 February 1840 it became a city, with more than 2,000 residents and George W. Wood as its first mayor.

Growth

The Wabash and Erie Canal made the town. Ground broke at Fort Wayne on 22 February 1832 because the town stood at the highest point on the route — the summit between the Maumee and the Wabash watersheds, and the origin of the nickname “Summit City.” The Fort Wayne–Huntington stretch was the first Indiana section in traffic: the canal boat Indiana reached Huntington in July 1835. On 4 July 1843 through navigation opened from Toledo to Lafayette by way of Fort Wayne, with Lewis Cass speaking at the celebration at the Swinney homestead. At its full 1853 length, to Evansville, the canal ran 468 miles, the longest in North America. It did not last: the canal was abandoned in 1874 and sold in 1877, and in 1881 the Nickel Plate railroad took over the Fort Wayne roadbed.

The railroads replaced it and did far more. The Ohio and Indiana Railroad completed its line to Fort Wayne at the end of October 1854. The Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago consolidated in 1856 and ran through to Chicago by 1858–59. In 1857 that railroad chose Fort Wayne for its construction and repair shops, on land Samuel Hanna donated — the Pennsy Shops, which employed some 3,950 people by 1913, built locomotives until after the First World War and rebuilt them until 1933, and earned the city a shop nickname of its own: “Altoona of the West.”

On the base of transport and machine shops, Fort Wayne became a factory city of unusual inventiveness. James A. Jenney arrived in 1881 with an arc lamp and dynamo; his company lit the New Orleans World’s Fair in 1884, passed under Thomson-Houston control in 1888, and became part of General Electric in 1899 — at its late-1940s peak, GE employed roughly 40 percent of the city’s workforce. S. F. Bowser sold his first self-measuring pump in 1885, and with Wayne Pump and Tokheim the city became a national centre of fuel-pump making. In 1911 GE began making home refrigerators here — the first sold that year, at about $1,000 — and the same year George Jacobs, a former GE chemist, founded the Dudlo magnet-wire company; through Dudlo and its successors Fort Wayne became the world’s leading magnet-wire producer. International Harvester built trucks on East Pontiac Street from 1923, and Magnavox moved its manufacturing here in 1930. The business history below tells these stories firm by firm.

Twice, the rivers that made the city nearly unmade it. In March 1913, 4.75 inches of rain fell on 23–25 March; the Maumee rose from 6.7 feet on Easter Sunday to 19.6 feet the next morning and crested at 26.1 feet late on 26 March, eleven feet above flood stage. The Lakeside dike broke in four places, the power plant flooded and the city went dark; some 5,500 homes and businesses were damaged, about 15,000 people were left homeless, and damage ran to about $4.8 million. Six people drowned, and a seventh man, a rescuer, died in the relief work. In March 1982 the city fought the rivers again and won: a winter of 81.2 inches of snow — the most since 1911 — melted into rain on frozen ground, the Nebraska dike broke and about 3,000 people were evacuated there alone, some 9,000 across the city, with about 2,000 buildings damaged and no lives lost. President Reagan joined a sandbag line on 16 March. The fight is a large part of why Fort Wayne took the All-America City award in 1983. The long flood work that followed remade the old “Thumb” between the rivers as Headwaters Park in the 1990s, on the ground where Kekionga’s portage began.

Government, in brief

Allen County was organised in 1824, and its first officers were chosen in Alexander Ewing’s tavern — Washington Hall, at Barr and Columbia streets. Six years later the village’s citizens voted to incorporate as a town, electing an assessor, a treasurer and a tax collector among their first officers. City government began with incorporation on 22 February 1840 and the election of George W. Wood, a New York-born, law-trained man who had given up law to become the town’s second newspaperman, beside the Sentinel’s founder Thomas Tigar. Wood won a second one-year term in 1841 and resigned halfway through it.

Fort Wayne today is run on a strong mayor–council system. The mayor is the chief executive — proposing the budget, signing legislation, appointing department heads and running day-to-day operations — and serves four-year terms with no limit. The Common Council is the legislative and fiscal body: nine members, six elected by districts of roughly 44,000 residents each and three at large, also serving four-year terms without limit. Council meets on the first four Tuesdays of the month at Citizens Square, 200 East Berry Street. The City Clerk keeps the city’s official papers, ordinances and council agendas, runs the Violations Bureau and parking enforcement, and administers oaths of office.

The present mayor is Sharon Tucker, a Democrat. The city’s longest-serving mayor, Tom Henry — twenty years on City Council, then five terms in the mayor’s office — died in office on 28 March 2024. Deputy Mayor Karl Bandemer acted for 26 days, and on 23 April 2024 a Democratic caucus seated Tucker, then a council member, to complete the term. She is the 37th person, and the 46th administration, to hold the office. The City Clerk is John McGauley, in service since January 2026 after two terms as Allen County Recorder. The council as seated in late 2026: at-large, Martin Bender (Republican, council president), Michelle Chambers (Democratic) and Tom Freistroffer (Republican); District 1, Paul Ensley (Republican); District 2, Russ Jehl (Republican); District 3, Nathan Hartman (Republican) — the seat Tucker held before becoming mayor; District 4, Scott Myers (Republican); District 5, Geoff Paddock (Democratic); District 6, Rohli Booker (Democratic). Allen County’s fiscal body, the County Council, has seven members — four by district and three at large — meeting at the Rousseau Centre on East Main Street.

The mayors of Fort Wayne, 1840 to today

Thirty-seven people have held the office across 46 administrations. Fort Wayne kept re-electing its mayors: William J. Hosey held the office in four separate stints, Charles Zollinger, Franklin Randall, Henry Scherer and Harry Baals in two each, and Winfield Moses left the office in July 1985 and was returned to it by a party caucus twelve days later, city controller Cosette Simon serving eleven days in between as the city’s first woman mayor. Harry Baals, often called the longest-serving, in fact served about fifteen years across his terms and died in office in 1954; Tom Henry’s sixteen years, 2008 to 2024, are the longest service in the office’s history.

People and events

Little Turtle (Mihšihkinaahkwa, died 14 July 1812) was the Miami war leader who beat two American armies and then, at Greenville, argued for peace with the third; his “glorious gate” description of the confluence is the earliest summary of why a city stands here. William Wells (Apekonit, died 1812), captured as a boy and raised Miami, married Little Turtle’s daughter, interpreted at Greenville and served as U.S. Indian agent at Fort Wayne; Little Turtle died under his roof, and a month later Wells was killed at Fort Dearborn, in Chicago. Anthony Wayne (1745–1796) commanded the Legion, won at Fallen Timbers, chose the fort site and gave the city its name without ever governing the town that grew from it — he died at Presque Isle, Pennsylvania, two years after the dedication. Jean Baptiste de Richardville (1761–1841), Miami chief and treaty negotiator across five decades, built the house on Bluffton Road that still stands as the city’s oldest brick home; his family’s treaty exemption spared them the 1846 removal for a generation.

John Chapman (1774–1845) — Johnny Appleseed — the Swedenborgian missionary and nurseryman, died in Fort Wayne on 18 March 1845; the Sentinel’s obituary of 22 March 1845 already remarked on his strange dress and his bare feet in bad weather. One correction is worth making plainly, because the marker in Johnny Appleseed Park invites the mistake: Chapman was buried in the Archer family ground, but nobody knows exactly where, and the stone in the park, set in 1934, marks the traditional spot rather than a located grave. George W. Wood (1808–1871), the city’s first mayor, arrived as a newspaperman and left the office early to return to private life. S. F. Bowser, the pump maker, sold his first self-measuring pump to a Fort Wayne grocer in 1885 — for kerosene, not gasoline; the gasoline pump came twenty years later.

Fort Wayne’s natives known to the wider world include the actress Carole Lombard (born Jane Alice Peters here in 1908, the defining screwball comedienne of 1930s Hollywood, killed in a plane crash in 1942 returning from a war-bond tour); the fashion designer Bill Blass (1922–2002); the actors Shelley Long (born 1949, raised here, Diane Chambers on Cheers), Dick York (1928–1992, Darrin Stephens on Bewitched) and Jenna Fischer (born here in 1974 and raised in St. Louis, Pam Beesly on The Office); and in sport, the football Hall of Famer Rod Woodson (Snider High School and Purdue, then the Steelers and Ravens), the winger DaMarcus Beasley, who played at four World Cups between 2002 and 2014, and the basketball centre Mason Plumlee, a Duke national champion in 2010 and an Olympic gold medallist in 2016. Ralph Baer (1922–2014) belongs here by adoption rather than birth: a New Hampshire engineer, he invented the “Brown Box” game console at home, and it became the Magnavox Odyssey — the first commercial home video game — only after a licensing decision taken at Magnavox headquarters in Fort Wayne in March 1971 and the engineering work that followed here. The console is sometimes described as a Fort Wayne invention; the inventing was Baer’s, and Fort Wayne’s part was turning it into a product a family could buy, from September 1972.

Two sporting dates anchor the city’s calendar of firsts. On 4 May 1871 the Fort Wayne Kekiongas beat Cleveland 2–0 in the first game played in the first professional baseball league — first only because the Boston–Washington game the day before had been rained out. On 2 June 1883, seventeen Jenney arc lamps lit League Park for a night game between Quincy and Methodist College, Quincy winning 19–11 before about 2,000 people — baseball under lights, played here years before it became common, though not the first such game ever played. The city’s annual gatherings today centre on Headwaters Park, the festival ground between the rivers; on the Embassy Theatre (built 1928), home each November to the Festival of Trees; and on the Night of Lights downtown each November, when the holiday season is switched on. Holiday lights fill Parkview Field, the downtown ballpark, through the New Year.

Timeline

• c. 1700 France keeps a trading post, Fort Miami, at the Miami town of Kekionga at the confluence of the St. Joseph and St. Marys.
• 1760 Britain takes the French post; the Miami take it back in 1763, during Pontiac’s War.
• 1790 Little Turtle’s forces defeat General Josiah Harmar’s expedition around Kekionga, 19–22 October.
• 1791 St. Clair’s army is destroyed near present-day Fort Recovery, Ohio, 4 November — the U.S. Army’s worst defeat at Native hands.
• 1794 Wayne wins at Fallen Timbers, 20 August. Fort Wayne is dedicated and named on 22 October, the city’s founding date.
• 1795 Treaty of Greenville, 3 August: twelve tribes cede most of Ohio and tracts including the Fort Wayne portage.
• 1812 Little Turtle dies, 14 July. In September a force of about 500 Potawatomi and Miami besieges Fort Wayne for a week; Harrison relieves it on 12 September.
• 1819 The Army withdraws; a federal land office opens.
• 1823 The town of Fort Wayne is platted.
• 1824 Allen County is organised, its first officers chosen in Ewing’s Tavern (Washington Hall). Both Barr and Columbia taverns take out the county’s first tavern licences.
• 1827 Richardville builds his treaty house on Bluffton Road. The county’s first water-powered gristmill, Barnett and Hanna’s, is completed on the St. Marys.
• 1829 Fort Wayne incorporates as a town, population about 300.
• 1832 Ground breaks for the Wabash and Erie Canal at Fort Wayne, the summit of the route, 22 February.
• 1833 The Sentinel, Fort Wayne’s first newspaper, is founded by Thomas Tigar and Samuel V. B. Noel, 6 July.
• 1835 The canal boat Indiana reaches Huntington — the first Indiana canal section in traffic. The Fort Wayne branch of the State Bank of Indiana, the town’s first bank, opens 25 August.
• 1840 Fort Wayne incorporates as a city, 22 February; George W. Wood is elected first mayor.
• 1843 Through canal navigation opens, Toledo to Lafayette by way of Fort Wayne, 4 July. At full length in 1853 the canal runs 468 miles, the longest in North America.
• 1845 John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed, dies in Fort Wayne, 18 March.
• 1846 The Miami Removal, 6–7 October: hundreds of Myaamia are loaded onto canal boats at Peru and Fort Wayne and taken west to Kansas.
• 1854 The railroad era opens: the Ohio and Indiana completes its line to Fort Wayne at the end of October.
• 1857 The Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad establishes its construction and repair shops — the Pennsy Shops — on land donated by Samuel Hanna.
• 1871 The Fort Wayne Kekiongas beat Cleveland 2–0 on 4 May in the first game of the first professional baseball league.
• 1874 The Wabash and Erie Canal is abandoned; it is sold in 1877, and the Nickel Plate takes the Fort Wayne roadbed in 1881.
• 1881 James A. Jenney organises his electric company on 1 November; it lights the New Orleans World’s Fair in 1884 and becomes part of General Electric in 1899.
• 1883 Baseball under lights at League Park, lit by seventeen Jenney arc lamps, 2 June.
• 1885 S. F. Bowser sells his first self-measuring pump, for kerosene, 5 September.
• 1911 GE begins making home refrigerators in Fort Wayne; George Jacobs founds the Dudlo magnet-wire company the same year.
• 1913 The Great Flood, 23–27 March: the Maumee crests at 26.1 feet, about 15,000 people are left homeless, six drown and a rescuer dies in the relief work.
• 1923 International Harvester begins truck production on East Pontiac Street.
• 1928 The Embassy Theatre opens on West Jefferson Boulevard.
• 1930 Magnavox moves its manufacturing to Fort Wayne, drawn by the magnet-wire supply; headquarters follows in 1932.
• 1953 WKJG-TV signs on, 21 November — Fort Wayne’s first television station. WANE follows in 1954 and WPTA in 1957.
• 1972 Magnavox ships the Odyssey from Fort Wayne in September, the first commercial home video-game console.
• 1982 The flood fight, 12–19 March: about 9,000 people evacuated, no lives lost; President Reagan joins the sandbag line on 16 March. Fort Wayne takes the All-America City award in 1983.
• 1983 International Harvester’s last Fort Wayne truck rolls off the line, 15 July, ending sixty years of production.
• 1990s Flood-control work remakes the “Thumb” between the rivers as Headwaters Park, the city’s festival ground.
• 2015 General Electric’s Fort Wayne works close, ending a presence that began with Jenney Electric in 1881. The Broadway campus, Electric Works, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2023.
• 2024 Mayor Tom Henry dies in office, 28 March. Sharon Tucker is seated by party caucus on 23 April, the 37th person to hold the office.

Businesses

Fort Wayne’s working life begins with the Indian trade and the tavern, runs through mills, a bank and a market, and arrives at the railroad shops and the factories that made the city’s name — pumps, hosiery, magnet wire, trucks and television. What follows works from the oldest businesses forward, still open or long gone alike.

Samuel Hanna’s store — the Barnett–Hanna trading post (1819)

The town’s first firm grew out of the Indian trade. Samuel Hanna kept a store for Indian trade and general merchandising at Barr and Columbia streets, growing from a log cabin into a brick block, with branches at Lafayette, Wabash and South Bend. It continued under his sons as S. Hanna and Sons; exactly when it finally closed is not known.

Suttenfield’s Tavern (1823)

William Suttenfield’s house on the northeast corner of Barr and Columbia, on lot 33, was one of the town’s first two taverns. It held the first tavern licence granted in organised Allen County, on 10 August 1824. Little else of its course survives, and no closing date is known.

Washington Hall (1820s)

Alexander Ewing’s tavern on the southwest corner of Barr and Columbia — also called Washington House — was licensed in 1824 and has the larger place in the town’s history: Allen County was organised inside it that year. Ewing’s family went on to the fur trade on a much bigger scale (see the Ewing company, below).

W.G. and G.W. Ewing Company (1827–1854)

The House of Ewing — William G. Ewing and George Washington Ewing — dealt in furs and the Indian trade, merchandise, land and removal contracting, and at its height rivalled the American Fur Company east of the Mississippi. The firm wound up after William’s death in 1854; the estate settlement was finished in October 1865.

Barnett and Hanna Mill (1827–1888)

The county’s first water-powered mill, a gristmill on the St. Marys River in what is now Foster Park, completed in August 1827 (an 1868 county history dates the building a few years earlier). Under later owners it was the Fairfield, the Beaver or Glenwood, and the Esmond mill. It burned on 15 May 1888, after 61 years, and was never rebuilt.

Holcomb and Marquis Tannery (1828)

Absalom Holcomb and Isaac Marquis opened their tannery at the west end of Columbia Street in 1828. The firm’s own end is lost, but its building had a long second life as a hotel — the Robinson, then the Grand (1876), the Brunswick (1888) and the Randall (1889) — standing until 1963.

Zenas Henderson’s general store (c. 1828)

Henderson’s store stood at the northeast corner of Calhoun and Columbia, with his brick tavern-house on the same corner — one of the town’s three early hotels, and host of the Christmas Temperance Ball on 24 December 1833. No closing date is known.

The Sentinel (1833–2020)

Fort Wayne’s first newspaper, founded on 6 July 1833 by Thomas Tigar and Samuel V. B. Noel. In its long course it became the Times and Sentinel, then The Democrat (1866), took the Sentinel name back in 1873, and in 1918 merged to form the News-Sentinel. Print ended in 2017–18 and publication was suspended in November 2020.

Coles and Wines Mill (by 1834–1871)

David Coles’s sawmill on the Maumee was advertised for sale on 14 June 1834, which is the earliest firm date it carries. Marshall Wines bought it in the autumn of 1838 and added the flour mill known as Woodlawn. Fire destroyed it on 24 March 1871, and it was never rebuilt.

Fort Wayne Branch, State Bank of Indiana (1835–1857)

The town’s first bank opened on 25 August 1835, with Hugh McCulloch — later Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Lincoln and Johnson — as cashier from October 1835. When the state bank’s charter ran out, successor branches opened on 1 January 1857.

Barr Street Market (1837–today)

Samuel Hanna donated the land in 1837, and a frame market house was up within six months, its stalls renting at $5 a year. The city ran the market until 1966; it survives today as the YLNI Farmers Market, still doing its original work on the original ground.

The Fort Wayne Times (1840–1866)

The town’s second newspaper, a Whig paper founded in 1840 (a surviving issue dates its existence to 29 August that year) and run from September 1853 by John W. Dawson. The Times as a separate title ends in 1866.

Bass Foundry and Machine Works (1853–after 1945)

Founded in 1853, Bass made railroad car wheels and axles, and at its peak led the world in railroad-wheel making. The firm went through a bankruptcy reorganisation in 1939 and closed after the Second World War.

The Pennsy Shops (1857–1953)

The Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad chose Fort Wayne for its construction and repair shops in 1857, buying the operation on Samuel Hanna’s donated land that September. About 3,950 people worked there by 1913; Fort Wayne built locomotives until after the First World War and rebuilt them until 1933. The last railroad operations closed in 1953, and the property was abandoned by 1966.

Jenney Electric, later General Electric (1881–2015)

James A. Jenney’s arc-light company was organised on 1 November 1881; its lamps lit the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair and League Park’s 1883 night game. Thomson-Houston took control in 1888, James J. Wood arrived in 1890 to build its motor and dynamo work, and the works became part of General Electric in 1899. GE made refrigerators here from 1911 and at its late-1940s peak employed about 40 percent of the city’s workforce. The long decline ended with closure in 2015. The Broadway campus — Electric Works — was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2023 and has been redeveloped as a mixed-use district.

S. F. Bowser and Company (1885–early 1960s)

Sylvanus F. Bowser’s self-measuring pump company stood at 1302 East Creighton Avenue. The first sale, on 5 September 1885, was a pump for kerosene; the gasoline version followed in 1905, and Bowser, Wayne Pump and Tokheim together made Fort Wayne the gas-pump capital of the country. Headquarters left for Chicago in the mid-1950s and the Fort Wayne plant closed in the early 1960s. The company’s papers and glass negatives are held by the History Center.

Wayne Knitting Mills (1891–1960)

Theodore F. Thieme’s full-fashioned hosiery mill — “Wayne Knit” — stood at West Main Street and Growth Avenue, on what became known as Knitters Avenue. At its height it employed about 2,500 people and was one of the city’s largest employers of women. Thieme sold the company to Munsingwear in 1923, against his own wishes as founder; the Fort Wayne mill closed in 1960.

Wayne Pump Company (early 1890s)

The second of the three pump firms: Wayne Pump’s first pump designs date to the early 1890s, and the company grew with the service-station age it helped supply. No Fort Wayne operation remains, but the brand survives today inside Dover Fueling Solutions.

United Knitting Mills (1898)

Frederick Thieme’s children’s-hosiery company, incorporated in September 1898 at Cleveland Avenue and the Lake Erie and Western Railroad with $50,000 of capital, as the city directory of 1900 states it. It made “Pony Stockings” for Wayne Knitting Mills and was later bought in by Frederick’s brother Theodore.

Tokheim (1901; in Fort Wayne 1918–2006)

John J. Tokheim founded his pump company at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1901 and moved it whole to Fort Wayne in 1918 — the third of the pump firms. During the Second World War the Fort Wayne plant built bombs; by the mid-1990s Tokheim led the North American market for gasoline dispensing. A bankruptcy split the corporation in 2003, and the Fort Wayne plant closed on 28 February 2006. The brand continues under Dover Fueling Solutions.

Thieme Brothers Hosiery Company (1909–c. 1925)

Theodore and John Thieme’s silk-hosiery company, a subsidiary of Wayne Knitting Mills, worked from the autumn of 1909 in the new fireproof silk mill on Knitters Avenue. It was left out of the 1923 Munsingwear sale, and the Fort Wayne branch was sold about 1925.

Dudlo Manufacturing Company (1911–1933)

George Jacobs’s magnet-wire company, formed in 1911 and on Wall Street from 1912, is the firm that made Fort Wayne the magnet-wire capital of the world: by 1922 it was the largest magnet-wire maker anywhere. Dudlo merged into General Cable in 1927, and Fort Wayne production moved to Rome, New York, in 1933. Its people and its plant went on to seed much of the wire industry that stayed (see Inca, Rea and Essex, below).

International Harvester — Fort Wayne Works (1923–1983)

The city’s biggest factory of the twentieth century. Building began in 1922 on East Pontiac Street and production in 1923; over sixty years the works built 1,527,299 trucks, and the adjacent plant built 532,674 Scout vehicles between 1960 and 1980. Employment peaked at 10,600 in early 1979. When Harvester decided to consolidate, the city, county and state assembled a $31 million package to keep the plant; it lost to Springfield, Ohio. The closure was announced on the front page of the Journal Gazette on 28 September 1982, and the last truck rolled off the line on 15 July 1983.

Theme Brothers Hosiery (1923)

The Thieme brothers carried their Fort Wayne hosiery business to the West Coast: Theodore Thieme bought land in Los Angeles in 1921, Fort Wayne knitting men staffed the start in 1923, and his brother John managed the mill. Theodore entrusted it to John in 1925. How the Los Angeles venture ended is not known.

Inca Manufacturing Company (late 1920s)

George Jacobs’s second magnet-wire company — the first Dudlo spin-off, founded a year or two after he left General Cable at the end of the 1920s. Within a few years it was sold to Phelps Dodge and became the basis of Phelps Dodge Magnet Wire in Fort Wayne.

Capehart, later Farnsworth Television and Radio (1928; in Fort Wayne 1929–1956)

Homer Capehart’s automatic-phonograph company was incorporated at Huntington in February 1928 and settled in Fort Wayne, at 3700 East Pontiac Street, from 15 June 1929. It was sold to Philo Farnsworth’s television company at the end of the 1930s and then to ITT in 1949; the Capehart consumer line was sold off in 1956 and the name disappeared from radio and television.

Magnavox (1917; in Fort Wayne 1930–1995)

Peter Pridham and Edwin Jensen’s loudspeaker company was formed in California in 1917. It moved its manufacturing to Fort Wayne in 1930 to be near the magnet-wire supply, built its plant in 1931 and brought its headquarters in 1932. Magnavox made the city a consumer-electronics town — radios, televisions, stereos — and shipped the Odyssey game console from here in September 1972. Consumer electronics left for Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1981, and the Fort Wayne defence group was sold to Hughes in 1995. Nothing under the Magnavox name remains in the city.

Rea Magnet Wire Company (1933–today)

Victor Rea formed his magnet-wire company in 1933, out of Dudlo — on its own telling, the first independent producer of enamelled wire in the country. Rea is still operating and headquartered in Fort Wayne. It bought the Phelps Dodge magnet-wire business in 2006, gathering the old Inca line into itself, and was acquired by Germany’s Elektrisola in 2023.

Essex Wire — Fort Wayne plant (1936–today)

Addison Holton’s Detroit wire company, founded in 1930, bought the vacant Dudlo plant on Wall Street in 1936 and grew into Essex International. The headquarters later left for Atlanta; the Fort Wayne operation continues today under Superior Essex.

Fort Wayne Metals (1946–today)

Ardelle Glaze founded his first wire company in 1946 making recording wire, and within five years it was supplying most of the United States market for it. That company was sold and its Fort Wayne plant closed in 1968; Glaze founded the present firm anew in 1971, in medical wire. Still family-owned in Fort Wayne, it employed more than 1,500 people in 2024.

Bowmar Instrument Corporation (1951–today)

Edward and Joan White’s precision-gearing company started in a barn loft at Smith Field in 1951. Its Bowmar Brain, of the autumn of 1971, is generally regarded as the first pocket-size calculator with an LED display; the calculator market’s collapse took the company into Chapter XI bankruptcy protection in February 1975. It survived on defence work and operates today as Bowmar LLC.

K&K Insurance Group (1952–today)

Nord and Teddi Krauskopf’s specialty insurer was born in 1952 out of a benevolent fund for injured racing drivers. K&K itself owned a NASCAR team, winning the 1970 Grand National championship with driver Bobby Isaac. Aon bought the company in 1993; it is still headquartered in Fort Wayne, insuring sports, leisure and events under the motto “Insuring the World’s Fun.”

WKJG-TV, now WISE-TV (1953–today)

Fort Wayne’s first television station: William Kunkel’s WKJG-TV signed on at 7:45 p.m. on 21 November 1953, with Hilliard Gates speaking the first words. Renamed WISE-TV in 2003, it was the city’s NBC station until the 2016 affiliation change made it The CW. Today it is a Gray Media station, sharing a home with WPTA.

WANE-TV (1954–today)

The market’s second station signed on 26 September 1954 as WINT, licensed to Waterloo and aimed at Fort Wayne. Indiana Broadcasting bought it in 1956, renamed it WANE-TV and moved it into the city. A CBS affiliate throughout its life, it is today owned by Nexstar and based at 2915 West State Boulevard.

WPTA (1957–today)

Sarkes Tarzian’s channel 21 signed on 28 September 1957, with Fort Wayne studios but a licence held at Roanoke, because the federal regulators judged the market too small for three stations. Its call letters are the initials of Tarzian’s children. Known from 1978 as “21 Alive” — a name retired in 2016 and revived in 2022 — it is today Gray Media’s ABC station, with NBC carried on its second channel.

Classic Products Corporation (1959–today)

Bob Carteaux and Marty Schmidt started their bowling-supply firm in 1959 in the Key Lanes pro shop, as Fort Wayne Bowling Supply. The T-shirt lettering side of the business outgrew the bowling side; the bowling operation was sold in 1987 and the company renamed Classic Products Corporation. A Brunswick buyout announced in December 2024 was amicably called off a week later; the firm remains independent at 4617 Industrial Road.

Ward Pattern and Engineering, now Ward Corporation (1964–today)

Marion and Vern Ward’s pattern shop opened on 18 May 1964 in 1,500 square feet of the old Wayne Knitting Mills building on Growth Avenue. Ward Aluminum Casting followed in 1978, taking over Gail Cole’s foundry business (see Cole Precision Castings, below). Still family-owned at 642 Growth Avenue, the company employs more than 250 people across four divisions.

Brown Equipment Company (1968–today)

Ralph E. Brown opened his municipal-equipment firm in Fort Wayne in 1968, built in its early years around the Porta-Patcher pothole patcher. From manufacturing it became a factory-authorised dealer, and today it runs seven locations across five states.

Cole Precision Castings (1969–1978)

Gail Cole’s aluminium foundry started in 1969 beside his brother-in-law’s Ward pattern shop on Growth Avenue, making prototype and short-run sand castings for aerospace and automotive customers. It had grown to 40 employees by 1978, when Ward Aluminum Casting was formed by taking over its assets.

The place today

Fort Wayne is a city of 263,886 people (2020 census), still Indiana’s second-largest, and still shaped by the rivers it has spent a century learning to hold back. The factory age left both losses and survivors: Harvester and GE are gone, but Rea Magnet Wire, Fort Wayne Metals, Bowmar and Ward still make things here, and the old GE Broadway campus has a second life as the Electric Works district. The city’s public life runs through the ground this page began with — the festival lawn at Headwaters Park between the rivers, a few streets from where Kekionga stood. Its recent history turned on a death and a caucus: Tom Henry’s sixteen years in the mayor’s office ended with his death in March 2024, and Sharon Tucker, the 37th person to hold the office, leads the city now, with the next mayoral election in 2027.

Sources: Treaty texts in the U.S. Statutes at Large (Treaty of Greenville, 7 Stat. 49) and treaty scans in the National Archives Catalog; Proceedings of the Court of Enquiry into General Harmar’s conduct (Philadelphia, 1791); the Fort Wayne Garrison Orderly Book, 1812, transcribed by Ball State University’s Forts of Fort Wayne exhibit; Myaamia Center teaching histories; the History Center (Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society), including its Richardville House history and the S. F. Bowser and Co. collection; the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center’s newspaper runs (1833 to the present) and city directories (from Williams’s directory of 1858–59); the News-Sentinel’s Cityscapes history series and its March 1913 flood history drawn from the three 1913 daily papers and birth, death, funeral, cemetery, census and directory entries; the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center, Working Paper 73, The Fort Wayne Flood: A Case Study (1984); National Register of Historic Places nominations and listings, including Baker Street Station and the Electric Works campus (2023); the Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana’s business and industry histories, with newspaper citations, and its people files; Quest Club industry papers on the railroad shops and magnet wire; City of Fort Wayne official rosters, council pages and mayoral history; Allen County government pages; company histories of Rea Magnet Wire, Fort Wayne Metals, K&K Insurance, Classic Products and Brown Equipment; U.S. Census figures for 2020.