Allen County, Indiana · 20th century
1900s
48 dated events in 1900s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
20th century 48 dated mentions
1900s
- 1900Arnold Gerberding — the hardware co-operative
Arnold Gerberding spent a quarter-century learning hardware before he founded anything: born in Fort Wayne in 1900, he went to work for Pfeiffer Hardware after high school, spent nearly two decades as a buyer at Schafer Hardware in Decatur, and was general sales manager at Auburn Hardware from 1943 to 1945.
Fort Wayne
- 1900The private sanitaria of the directory era
The Polk directory of 1900 lists, under baths, the Kneipp Sanitarium and Water Cure at 181 Calhoun Street, kept by William F. Kuhbach — the cold-water regimen that was the era's respectable treatment for nervous exhaustion.
Fort Wayne
- 1901Tokheim — Tokheim Manufacturing Company (Cedar Rapids) → Tokheim Oil Tank and Pump Company → Tokheim Corporation
Founded: 1901, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with a 1900 variant flagged. NOT founded in Fort Wayne.
Fort Wayne
- 1901John B. Franke — the baker who gave the city a park
John B. Franke established the Wayne Biscuit Company in Fort Wayne in 1901, at 350 Pearl Street — the company that became Perfection Biscuit, then Perfection Bakeries, and in time the Aunt Millie's Bakeries of the Business record.
Fort Wayne
- 1901Francis M. Price Elementary School
The building stands at 1901 West State Boulevard, on the city's northwest side, where it has anchored its neighborhoods ever since, through the whole postwar growth of that part of Fort Wayne and into the present century.
Fort Wayne
- 1901The burial ground: God's Acre
The cemetery was in use from July 1901 to May 1967. There is one large stone, dated 1901 to 1967, and the graves themselves were never individually marked; research into the ground indicates more than two hundred graves, possibly more.
Fort Wayne
- 1901–1912George Jacobs and Ethel Mossman Jacobs: the enamel that made magnet wire
George Jacobs (1877–1945), a young chemist at General Electric's Fort Wayne Works in 1901, took up the problem of a chemical enamel that could be baked onto wire of any thickness, yet stay flexible enough to wind.
Fort Wayne
- 1901–1941The interurban web — electric cars to everywhere
Interurban service came to Fort Wayne in 1901, southwest to Huntington, and the lines multiplied until the 1910 city directory listed five traction companies serving the city.
Fort Wayne
- 1901–todayPerfection Biscuit Company — Perfection Bakeries — Aunt Millie's
Founded: John B. Franke established the company in Fort Wayne in 1901, at 350 Pearl Street. The company's own history and the History Center give the original name as the Wayne Biscuit Company ; an ACGSI place page also renders it "Fort Wayne Biscuit Company" in one line — the company name of record is Wayne Biscuit.
Fort Wayne
- 1902The Wayne Candies founders — Heit, Miller, Lau and Dickmeyer
The Heit-Miller-Lau Company was named for its three founders — Anthony Heit, Joseph Miller and Thomas Lau — who began it in 1902.
Fort Wayne
- 1902The newcomers' studios: Roggen, Copenolle, Ozaki, Kaung
The trade in an immigrant city: Adolph Roggen was born in Germany in 1864, immigrated in 1873, and reached Fort Wayne by way of Chicago, Galveston, Deadwood, Nebraska, Iowa, and Ohio, keeping a studio at 1122 Calhoun from 1902 to 1911 and serving as president of the Turnverein Vorwärts.
Fort Wayne
- 1902–1920Columbia Street: the first garages and agencies
Alfred C. Randall had been in the bicycle business since 1893; in 1902 he switched to an automobile garage and salesroom.
Fort Wayne
- 1902–1921Jitneys, gasoline, and the law of the street
By 2 September 1902 the Journal Gazette was reporting horses' antipathy to the new machines as a standing problem of city traffic, and the livery trade that the automobile was displacing housed, in the Winklemeyer barn of the 1899 account, the first automobile the contemporary press saw in the city.
Fort Wayne
- 1902–1983Peoples Trust and Savings Company
Founded: The People's Trust and Savings Company was founded in 1902.
Fort Wayne
- 1903The Rescue Mission
Founding: The Fort Wayne Rescue Mission was founded and organized in 1903 by two Mennonites, Witmer and Stuckey, of the Berne Mennonite Church — the Anabaptist encyclopedia records that the Berne congregation largely supported the mission in its early years.
Fort Wayne
- 1903The Landing's anchor: Columbia Street West
A bar since 1903: The Landing, the old canal-era Columbia Street blocks where the county's first taverns were licensed in 1824, kept a drinking room at its west end for most of the modern era: the building at 135 West Columbia Street, at Harrison, had been used as a bar since 1903, interrupted only by the Prohibition…
Fort Wayne
- 1904The Carnegie building
Dedication: The building was dedicated on 7 January 1904: Charles S. Bash presented it, Mayor Henry C. Berghoff accepted it for the city, and the speakers included Judge Robert S. Taylor and Merica Hoagland; Carnegie's letter was read in his absence.
Fort Wayne
- 1904The Majestic Theatre: the Berry Street playhouse
The city's turn-of-the-century playhouse: The Majestic Theatre at 216 East Berry Street opened on October 24, 1904, to an excited public, in the years when live theatre was still the nation's main dramatic entertainment.
Fort Wayne
- 1904Washington Blake, the Cute Studio, and a name the record does not finish
The directories give that name to a different man's business at the same address: J. V. Shea opened the Cute Studio at 1008 Calhoun in October 1904, selling small photographs, buttons, and stamps, and advertising in June 1905 that it would make twenty-eight images in four poses for twenty-five cents — "Every picture a good one.
Fort Wayne
- 1904The 4-H engine: the fair's permanent exhibitor
The roots: A county fair's exhibitors do not assemble themselves; in Indiana they are raised, club by club, by 4-H. Indiana 4-H was established in 1904 in Hamilton County by John F. Haines, a school superintendent, from the boys' and girls' club work of those years, and in 1914 4-H became part of the Cooperative…
Fort Wayne
- 1904–1957Majestic Theatre
Founded: The Majestic Theatre, at 216 East Berry Street, opened on 24 October 1904. It seated 800 and was the first theatre in Fort Wayne equipped with full electric lighting.
Fort Wayne
- 1904–2009Fort Wayne Bible College — Taylor University Fort Wayne
The Missionary Church Association re-founded the school in Fort Wayne in 1904, buying a four-acre grove on South Wayne Avenue for 1,800 dollars; Schultz Hall was its first building.
Fort Wayne
- 1905Lincoln National Life Insurance Company
Founded: The Lincoln National Life Insurance Company was founded in Fort Wayne on 12 June 1905 (articles of incorporation drawn 29 May 1905), organised out of the wreckage of a local 1902 fraternal-insurance scheme, the Fraternal Assurance Society of America.
Fort Wayne
- 1905Perry Randall and Arthur F. Hall — the men who founded Lincoln Life
Lincoln National Life was organised out of a wreck: the Fraternal Assurance Society of America had failed in 1902, and on 12 June 1905 — the articles of incorporation were drawn on 29 May — four Fort Wayne men founded the new company in its place.
Fort Wayne
- 1905–1918Departments and firsts, 1905–1918
The Indiana Collection — the seed of the library's later local-history and genealogy strength — was collecting from 1905, and survived until the early 1980s, when its materials were absorbed into other collections.
Fort Wayne
- 1905–1934Homer Van Meter · Fort Wayne's link to the Dillinger gang
He was born in Fort Wayne on December 3, 1905 — some records, including the Allen County Genealogical Society's cemetery survey, give 1906 — to Cary B. Van Meter, a railroad conductor, and Julia Miller Van Meter.
Fort Wayne
- 1905–todayThe other historic congregations · Pilgrim, Mount Olive and Union, True Love
The Baptist line: Fort Wayne's second historic Black congregation organized as Mount Olive Baptist Church in 1905 .
Fort Wayne
- 1906–1971Philo T. Farnsworth: the Fort Wayne chapter
The geography, once: Philo Taylor Farnsworth (19 August 1906 – 11 March 1971) invented electronic television in California — the first successful electronic transmission on 7 September 1927 in San Francisco, U.S. Patent No. 1,773,980…
Fort Wayne
- 1906–1981Rudisill School
Founded: 1906, when an existing Washington Township school at Spy Run Avenue and Ruth Street was converted to city use; a new twelve-room building followed — begun in 1912, opened in 1914 — named for Henry Rudisill, one of the founders of St. Paul's Lutheran congregation.
Fort Wayne
- 1907Eugenics: the first law in the nation, and Fort Wayne at its center
On 9 March 1907 Governor J. Frank Hanly signed "An Act to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists" — the era's words, quoted as written — making Indiana the first state in the nation, and the first government in the world, to enact a eugenic sterilization law.
Fort Wayne
- 1907–1949The Fort Wayne Colored Giants · the city's Black ball club
The Fort Wayne Colored Giants played from as early as 1907 until 1949 — the dates Alfred Brothers Jr. established in research he presented at the History Center in 2018, correcting his own first belief that the club had lasted about two years.
Fort Wayne
- 1908Fort Wayne Country Club
Founding: The Fort Wayne Country Club is the city's oldest surviving country club, and its own account of itself is consistent on the essentials: it was founded in 1908 by 75 charter members, who bought the original 88 acres of a property that has grown to 355 acres southwest of downtown.
Fort Wayne
- 1908The Anthony Hotel — later the Van Orman: the grand dame, 1908–1974
Construction began in 1905; the nine-story, 263-room house at 128 West Berry, the northeast corner of Berry and Harrison, took three years and $500,000, and opened with a celebratory banquet in February 1908.
Fort Wayne
- 1908The Lyric: vaudeville, burlesque, and the Wayne — one house, three names
The Calhoun Street house: The Lyric Theatre opened on October 12, 1908, at 1014 South Calhoun Street — the Lyric Theatre Building, 1012–1016 Calhoun in the 1923 city directory — as a house for vaudeville acts and movies, designed, like the Empress across downtown, by architect John M. E. Riedel.
Fort Wayne
- 1908Carole Lombard: the screwball queen, born on Rockhill Street
The tie: Carole Lombard was born Jane Alice Peters on October 6, 1908, at 704 Rockhill Street in Fort Wayne.
Fort Wayne
- 1908The Aveline fire: a cause no record names
Early on Sunday morning, May 3, 1908, the Aveline House, Francis Aveline's great brick hotel at the southeast corner of Calhoun and Berry streets, burned to a shell.
Fort Wayne
- 1908–1909The Economy Motor Buggy Company: Fort Wayne's motor-buggy factory
The company: The Economy Motor Buggy Company was founded in Fort Wayne in 1908 to build highwheelers — motor buggies on tall, carriage-style wheels, chain-driven, sold to a countryside still suspicious of pneumatic tires on mud roads.
Fort Wayne
- 1908–1923The first playground: the clubwomen's six acres
In 1905, under the state's Cities and Towns Law, Mayor Henry C. Berghoff appointed the first Board of Park Commissioners, and the board's early work ran quickly to children: the department's history records the first supervised playground in 1908, at the corner of Clinton and Douglas Streets, operated by Miss Carrie Snively.
Fort Wayne
- 1908–1942Carole Lombard: 704 Rockhill Street to the top of Hollywood
The birth: She was born Jane Alice Peters on 6 October 1908, at 704 Rockhill Street in Fort Wayne, the third child and only daughter of Frederic Christian Peters and Elizabeth Jayne Knight Peters, a prosperous family of the city's west central neighborhood.
Fort Wayne
- 1908–1974Hotel Anthony — later the Van Orman Hotel
Three years and $500,000 in the building; completed in 1908 at Berry and Harrison streets, to designs by Charles Weatherhogg.
Fort Wayne
- 1908–1974Fort Wayne City Light & Power
Fort Wayne first declared the need for a municipal light and power plant in 1898; voters approved construction in a 1906 referendum; the plant opened 29 August 1908 (ACGSI dates generation from September 1908), and the first service meter was set on Christmas Eve 1908.
Fort Wayne
- 1908–todayThe pattern: two lines, one calendar
The civic line opens with supervised play: Snively's playground of 1908, Guldlin's six acres of 1911, the park board's assumption of the playgrounds in 1923, the Franke Park Day Camp of 1946, the Y camp of 1920 just over the county line, the Youtheatre of 1934, the library's storytimes.
Fort Wayne
- 1909Mizpah Shrine and the circus that outlived the lodge era
Fezzes, a million-dollar temple, and a circus: The Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine — the Masons' self-styled playground, part parade, part hospital charity — had been tried in Fort Wayne once, about 1903, and had failed, as the Fort Wayne News recorded in 1909.
Fort Wayne
- 1909The press photographers
The first Fort Wayne newsman the record remembers as a photographer is Karl Detzer, born in Fort Wayne on 4 September 1891, who worked as a reporter and photographer for Fort Wayne newspapers from 1909 to 1916 before a Chicago advertising career, a stretch as a Hollywood screenwriter and technical director in 1934–36…
Fort Wayne
- 1909Thieme Brothers silk hosiery, and the family's clothing trade
The silk line beside the cotton giant: In 1909 Theodore F. Thieme brought his brother John into a second company, Thieme Brothers Hosiery, organized to work the silk end of the trade while Wayne Knitting Mills ran at full-fashioned scale.
Fort Wayne
- 1909–1914Elevating the south side — the Pennsylvania and Wabash go up, 1909–1914
The work: In 1909 the Pennsylvania and the Wabash announced a joint project to elevate their tracks through the city.
Fort Wayne
- 1909–1921Football first: the Friars, 1909–1921
The Fort Wayne Friars , sponsored by the Catholic Athletic Association, were playing independent professional football by 1913 — a 1909 founding is also carried in the registers — against the best independent elevens of Indiana and Ohio, in the years before any national league existed.
Fort Wayne
- 1909–1927Deposit stations and the first branches
In 1909 the public library placed a small deposit collection at the Wayne Knitting Mills, for the use of employees only.
Fort Wayne