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1838 – 1865
The private houses: Alongside the state-bank branch, Fort Wayne's early money was private. Allen Hamilton was in business as a banker by 1838 — Allen Hamilton & Co., an office of exchange and deposit whose full profile is carried in the business record — and Hugh McCulloch, the branch cashier, was his partner there while he ran the public bank by day. When the state system wound down, the private house was what remained standing: Stephen B. Bond became Allen Hamilton & Co.'s cashier on 25 September 1855, and the house carried Hamilton's name into the national era as the Hamilton National Bank.
The free-banking era: Indiana's 1852 free-banking law let almost any group of men open a bank on deposited security, and the state's wildcat years followed. No Fort Wayne institution chartered under that law has been found in the charters, directories and bank lists searched for this history: through the 1850s the town's banking stayed with the Bank of the State branch and the private houses, and when national charters replaced the state system in the 1860s it was those two lines — the branch and Hamilton's — that converted.
The layer persisted: Private banking did not die with the national system. The 1903 city directory still lists the Bank of Wayne, kept by Sol Mier & Co. at 127 East Berry, and Straus Bros. & Co.'s Commercial Bank at 805 Calhoun, and a 1913 booster count of the city's banking strength includes three private banks among its eleven institutions.
Sources:
- The business record of this history, Allen Hamilton & Co. entry — the house, its partners, Bond's 1855 cashiership.
- R. L. Polk & Co., Fort Wayne City Directory, 1903, "Banks and Bankers" — the Bank of Wayne and Straus Bros. & Co. listings.
- Fort Wayne: A Presentation of Her Resources (Fort Wayne News, 1913) — the count of eleven banking institutions, three of them private banks.