The State Bank branch — Fort Wayne's first money

1835 – 1857

The institution: Fort Wayne's first bank was a branch of somebody else's. The State Bank of Indiana — the parent bank's bill drafted by Samuel Hanna and enacted 28 January 1834 — opened its Fort Wayne branch on 25 August 1835, with Allen Hamilton as branch president and Hugh McCulloch, a young lawyer with no banking experience, as cashier from October 1835. The branch's full profile, including the unresolved conflict over its first site (Main and Clinton against Francis Comparet's house on Columbia Street), is carried in the business record.

The system: The branch was one office of a state-wide system of semi-autonomous branches under a central board, run — in McCulloch's own later account — under searching branch examinations. It issued notes, took deposits and lent, and it ended the town's reliance on the banks of the Ohio River valley and the east. Its lending years were the canal years: the Wabash & Erie Canal reached Fort Wayne in the 1830s–40s, canal and land money moved through the branch office, and the town's first bank grew up as the financial office of a canal port.

The handover: The old branches stopped discounting and began calling in their circulation on 1 January 1855; the successor's branches opened on 1 January 1857, largely with the same officers and premises, and the parent charter expired 1 January 1859. The successor was the Bank of the State of Indiana, chartered in 1855 over the governor's veto as a privately owned bank in which the state held no stock, with McCulloch as its first president; the Allen County Genealogical Society's timeline, following the History Center, calls the same successor the "privately held Second Bank of Indiana." The two names are carried as variants of one succession, as the business record states them. The Fort Wayne branch's separate identity ends with the 1857 handover.

Sources:

1. The business record of this history, State Bank of Indiana entry — branch date, officers, the site conflict, the successor-name variant.
2. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI), 1830–1839 timeline of Allen County, quoting the History Center — the 25 August 1835 branch date.