The nineteenth century · a blank page

1863–1900

No case: Fort Wayne had banks from the State Bank branch of the canal era forward, and by 1874 it had a First National Bank advertising itself as the first national bank organized in Indiana. What the published record reached for this section does not contain is a single documented robbery or burglary of a Fort Wayne bank in the nineteenth century. Griswold's 1917 pictorial history, which chronicles the city's banks year by year — their charters, officers, corners and quiet discontinuations — records no bank crime among the year's events; the county genealogical society's compiled files likewise carry none. The era's bank burglaries were real elsewhere in Indiana, and Fort Wayne's papers reported them, but they were other towns' cases, in other counties.

The first, when it came: when the Broadway State Bank was robbed in 1930, the city's newspapers called it Fort Wayne's first bank robbery, and no earlier case has surfaced in the record since to contradict them. The nineteenth-century losses of Fort Wayne banking were of a different kind — panics, runs and failures, in which depositors rather than bandits emptied the vaults — and that record is told in the Banks section.

Sources:

1. B. J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana (1917), year-by-year chronicle of the city's banks (charter of the First National Bank, 1863; Merchants National Bank, 1865–1874) — no bank robbery or burglary appears in the chronicle.
2. News-Sentinel, "Summit City History Notes: The straight story on 'Machine Gun' Kelly," Aug. 9, 1990 — the 1930 Broadway robbery described as Fort Wayne's first bank robbery.
3. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI), Allen INGenWeb people and timeline files, searched for bank-crime entries before 1900 — none found.