Trust companies, savings banks and the building-and-loan layer

1889 – 1922

The second system: Beside the national banks grew a state-chartered layer that took the savings of households the nationals did not court. Its anchor firms are profiled in the Businesses section: the Tri-State Loan and Trust Company, grown from the Tri-State Building and Loan Association organised in 1889; the Peoples Trust and Savings Company, founded 1902; and the Dime Trust & Savings Bank. Around them the directories name the rest of the layer: the Fort Wayne Trust Company at Court and Main in 1903, Henry C. Paul president and Samuel M. Foster vice-president; the Citizens' Trust Company at Main and Calhoun in 1918, Owen N. Heaton president; the Farmers' Trust Company, incorporated 27 March 1918 with $200,000 capital; and a German-American Trust Company that Griswold names Foster as an organiser of, beside the German-American National Bank — no dates for it were found in the records searched.

The small savers' machinery: The Teutonia Building, Loan & Savings Association, organised 22 March 1893 at 132 East Berry, met the first Tuesday of each month and turned German Fort Wayne's savings into its houses. Consumer credit arrived as its own industry: the Fort Wayne Morris Plan Company, incorporated 15 September 1915 at 217 East Berry — Theodore Wentz, the German-American banks' co-founder, as vice-president — and an Industrial Loan and Investment Company incorporated in 1918. Farm credit had a federal instrument of its own: the First Joint Stock Land Bank of Fort Wayne, which Frank H. Cutshall, later president of the Old National, served as president. And S. F. Bowser's Bowser Loan and Trust stood among the trustee banks that founded the Fort Wayne Foundation — the Community Foundation — on 2 June 1922; the News-Sentinel's history of Bowser adds that the bank he established for his employees folded with the Depression.

The shape of it: By the 1920s a Fort Wayne family could keep a savings account at a trust company, borrow its house money from a building-and-loan, its instalment money from the Morris Plan, and its farm mortgage from a land bank — a complete local credit system standing next to the national banks, and almost all of it chartered within a few downtown blocks.

Sources:

1. R. L. Polk & Co., Fort Wayne City Directories, 1903 and 1918, "Banks and Bankers" and "Building, Loan and Savings Associations."
2. The the Businesses section — the Tri-State, Peoples Trust and Dime Trust & Savings profiles; the Cutshall sketch (the First Joint Stock Land Bank presidency).
3. Community Foundation of Greater Fort Wayne, "A Century of Giving" — the founding banks of 1922, Bowser Loan and Trust among them.
4. News-Sentinel, "Cityscapes: Bowser and his pumps," 7 November 1981 — the employee bank that folded with the Depression.
5. Bert J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Vol. II (1917) — the German-American Trust Company.