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1863 – 1908
Founded: Completed in January 1863 at the southeast corner of Berry and Calhoun streets, the town's grand hotel of the Civil War era and for a generation the largest hotel of the region. Proprietor: Francis S. Aveline.
What it did: First-class hotel — the commercial travellers' and politicians' house of steamboat-and-rail Fort Wayne. In 1895 the Bell Telephone Company demonstrated long-distance voices and music there, Fort Wayne's first hearing of sound sent nine hundred miles over wires (Griswold).
Fate: Burned on 3 May 1908, with the loss of eleven to twelve lives — the toll is contested in the record: the next-day wire reports counted eleven known dead (the hotel register had burned, and no exact count was possible), Griswold's 1921 retelling and the History Center/ACGSI tradition give twelve, and Police Chief Ankenbruck believed as many as twenty bodies might remain in the ruins — one of the city's remembered disasters.
Sources:
- B. J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Vol. I (1917), parts 52 and 57.