First National Bank of Fort Wayne

1863 – consolidated 1917 (as First and Hamilton National Bank)

Founded: Organised in 1863 under the new National Banking Act, among Indiana's first national banks. Griswold's account (the passage opens mid-sentence in the surviving text) names the organising circle ending "…and Alfred D. Brandriff. The bank started with a paid-up capital of $100,000, which was shortly afterward increased to $400,000."

What it did: Commercial banking; issuer of national bank notes; for half a century one of the city's two or three principal banks. Successive presidents: Oscar A. Simons, John H. Bass and Charles H. Worden.

Course: In August 1905 the White National Bank was consolidated into it. In April 1917 it consolidated with the Hamilton National Bank — the successor of Allen Hamilton & Co. — and took the name First and Hamilton National Bank. Griswold, writing in 1917: "The institution has had a continuous history of prosperity."

Fate: The First and Hamilton name does not appear in the Federal Reserve's 1935 list of licensed Fort Wayne banks, which shows only the Fort Wayne National Bank and the Lincoln National Bank and Trust Company; how the bank ended in the Depression years — by failure, merger or voluntary liquidation — is not documented.

Sources:

1. B. J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Vol. I (1917), part 52 — capital, presidents, the 1905 and 1917 consolidations.
2. Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, licensed member bank lists, 1935 (FRASER) — Fort Wayne banks then licensed.