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1855–1939 · FORT WAYNE RESIDENT · A FORT WAYNE BOOK, PRINTED IN FORT WAYNE
The book. The first Fort Wayne novel of the ground itself that this record can put on the shelf is a privately printed one. Julia M. Baker Stapleford, who lived most of her life in Fort Wayne, published Wah-see-ola: The Light of the Tribes at the Meeting Waters in 1905, printed for her by the Fort Wayne Paper & Blank Book Company. In her preface she says the story "grew out of the discovery of an ancient relic found buried with an Indian supposed to be a chief" near the place it describes. The novel is set in the late seventeenth century, in and around the Native village on the banks of the St. Joseph at the mouth of the Maumee — the ground that later became the Lakeside neighborhood — and turns on its princess, Wah-see-ola, "Light of the Tribes," and a French commander, Xavier de Champeaux. It is a 342-page period romance in the language of its time, and it matters to this record for a plain reason: before Fort Wayne had a published history shelf of its own, a Fort Wayne woman was already imagining its first ground in fiction, and paying a Fort Wayne printer to put it between covers. The book survives in library copies and modern facsimile reprints.
Sources: Wah-see-ola (Fort Wayne, 1905), title page, copyright page, and author's preface (Internet Archive copy); booksellers' bibliographic records (Boyd Used & Rare Books; Hyde Brothers, Booksellers, Fort Wayne).