Turner Chapel A.M.E. · the first institution

1845 – TODAY

Founded by named men, on a dated deed: Turner Chapel is Fort Wayne's oldest Black congregation, and its founding is a document, not a tradition. By 1845 the A.M.E. Church's Ohio and Western Conference had taken responsibility for the fledgling congregation, served by ministers riding the Carthagena Circuit between Van Wert, Ohio, and the Eel River; the name of the clergyman who first gathered Black Fort Wayne in worship is not known. The Indiana Historical Society dates the congregation's establishment in the Hanna Addition to about 1847; the dated instrument is two years later. On 16 May 1849 three Black businessmen of the settlement — Willis W. Elliot, Henry H. Canada and George W. Fisher — bought at public land auction a lot on the south side of Jefferson Street between Francis and Hanna, and, to take the property off the tax rolls for a church, sold it to the Reverend George Nelson Black, a thirty-four-year-old blacksmith who ministered to the congregation, and had the deed registered in the name of the "Trustees of the African Methodist Episcopal Church of Fort Wayne, Indiana." No church rose: building materials were bought, but Indiana's black laws — crowned by Article XIII in 1851 — made building impossible, and the lot was sold in 1853.

The house of worship came after the war. In 1869 the Rev. Nixon Jordan was assigned; the congregation worshipped at Hafner's Hall until St. John's German Reformed Church offered its twenty-four-year-old frame building for sale. The A.M.E. officers bought it and moved it to a lot at Wayne and Francis streets donated by Emerine H. Hamilton, wife of the city's wealthiest man, and the chapel took the name of the Rev. Henry McNeal Turner, the Black chaplain of the Civil War who became an A.M.E. bishop. (The History Center's congregational telling dates the move to 1869; Castaldi's magazine account puts the establishment of the house of worship in 1871. Both stand in the Religion section, which owns the congregation's denominational record.) In 1888 the congregation built a larger church on the site — the first church building erected by an African American congregation in Fort Wayne. In 1963 the congregation purchased its present church at 836 East Jefferson Boulevard, a Gothic Revival building erected in 1927 for Calvary United Brethren. Its early records were destroyed by fire in 1979. The congregation made its building a locally designated historic district in October 2019, and in February 2022 the Calvary United Brethren–Turner Chapel A.M.E. Church was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Miller's First 200 Years treats Turner Chapel as the pillar institution of the community it chronicles — school, hall, meeting place and organizing center in the decades when Black Fort Wayne had no other building of its own.

Sources:

1. Tom Castaldi, "Turner Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church," History Center Notes & Queries (from Fort Wayne Magazine, February 2008) — the Carthagena Circuit, the 1849 lot, the black laws, the 1869 move, the 1888 building, the 1963 purchase; and Castaldi, "Fort Wayne's early African-American settlers" (from Fort Wayne Magazine, January/February 2004) — the 16 May 1849 purchase by Elliot, Canada and Fisher, the deed to the Rev. George Nelson Black and the A.M.E. trustees, the 1853 sale, the 1871 house of worship.
2. Indiana Historical Society, "Early Black Settlements by County" (Allen County) — the A.M.E. church established in the Hanna Addition about 1847.
3. Visit Fort Wayne, "History of Turner Chapel A.M.E. Church" (2021, updated 2026) — the 1849 founding, the 1869 Hamilton gift, the 1888 building, the 1963 move, the 2019 local district and the 2022 National Register listing.
4. The Religion section of this history — the congregation's buildings and the 1869/1897/1917 variants in the ACGSI survey, carried there in full.