The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
A century before the first greenway segment, Fort Wayne's first trail system was its streets, and its first trail organization was a bicycle club: the era of ordinaries and safeties, 1879 to 1900, survives in a resume the Historical Society preserves. The modern network began as citizens, not as a city department, when the Rivergreenway Consortium formed in the late 1970s to plan a linear park along the three rivers from county line to county line. The Rivergreenway grew into three pathways, St. Joseph, St. Marys and Maumee, all measured from a single zero marker at the confluence downtown. In 2011 the three building groups, the Consortium, Aboite New Trails and the rest, merged as Fort Wayne Trails and stopped bidding against one another. The section closes with the mileage kept as a dated ledger, each figure credited to the organization and year that published it, because the counters count different things.
The wheel before the network · ordinaries, safeties and the Fort Wayne Bicycle Club
1879 — 1900
A century before the first greenway segment, Fort Wayne's first trail system was its streets, and its first trail organization was a bicycle club. The early bicycle period in the city, 1879 to 1900, is documented in Cleo Goff…
A linear park on the riverbanks · the Consortium and the first miles
1970s — 1987
The Rivergreenway began as citizens, not as a city department. In the 1970s — the late 1970s, in the City's own later telling — a diverse group of citizens from the public and private sectors in Fort Wayne and Allen County met to…
The Rivergreenway in full · three pathways from the zero marker
1987 — today
The Rivergreenway is one trail with three names, one for each river, and all three are measured from a single point: the confluence of the St. Joseph and St. Marys rivers downtown, at the water filtration plant, is the zero-mile…
Three groups become one · Fort Wayne Trails, 2011
2001 — 2011, and after
For a decade the network had three builders, one for each corner of the county, and they were bidding against each other for the same money. The oldest was the Rivergreenway Consortium of the 1970s (above). The second, Aboite New…
The mileage, as stated · a dated ledger of the network's size
2001 — 2026
Every figure below belongs to the organization that published it, in the year it published it. The counts conflict because the counters count different things — paved multi-use trail, all trails, trails and sidepaths, Allen…
The Pufferbelly · a railroad that became a trail
1869 — today
The Pufferbelly Trail runs on the roadbed of the Fort Wayne, Jackson and Saginaw Railroad, built north from Fort Wayne beginning in 1869 — eighteen months, in Bill Adams' telling, to build the line toward Michigan — and later a…
The Poka-Bache Connector · the state's longest trail, in pieces
2000s — in construction
The Pufferbelly is one section of something larger: the Poka-Bache Connector, a State Visionary Trail in the Indiana Department of Natural Resources' system, planned to run from Pokagon State Park in Angola, through Steuben…
The Towpath · canal, then interurban, then trail
2005 — 2011
The Wabash and Erie Canal Towpath Trail — officially named for the transportation route it follows, and called just the Towpath Trail — runs 5.5 miles from Rockhill Park, where it leaves the Rivergreenway's Yarnell Trail…
The Aboite Trails · the southwest builds its own
2001 — today
The Aboite Trails are the network's suburban half: a web of paved paths along the roads, parks and hospital grounds of Aboite Township, southwest Fort Wayne, built by the citizens' group Aboite New Trails (founded December 2001…
Salomon Farm, Dupont Road and the northwest connectors
1996 — today
The northwest side's trails grew around a farm and a YMCA. Salomon Farm Park, at 817 West Dupont Road, became a city park in 1996 on the donated Salomon family farm. Its paved loop — the City measures the Salomon Farm Loop at…
The southeast links · Hanna Street, Beckett's Run and 6-Mile Creek
2010s — today
The south and east sides were the network's last gaps, and the named trails there are younger and plainer: road and creek corridors stitched toward the Rivergreenway's two southern anchors, Tillman Park and Moser Park. The Hanna…
Rails — and a canal — into trails · the mechanism
1983 — today
Fort Wayne's paved network is mostly other people's corridors, kept. The legal device that keeps an abandoned railroad corridor intact in the United States is railbanking: under the 1983 amendments to the National Trails System…
Floods, closures and the money
2005 — 2027
A trail built on levees is a trail that floods, and Fort Wayne's managers say so in their own project pages. The Maumee Pathway between Coliseum Boulevard and the Pierson Ditch "is flooded much of the spring every year and…
The network today · a million counted uses
2010 — today
Fort Wayne counts its trail users with machines, and the counts are the most exact numbers in this record. The City has run infrared trail counters since 2010 — fourteen locations in the system's earlier years — and publishes the…