Fort Wayne branch, State Bank of Indiana

1835 – 1857

Founded: 25 August 1835 — The date 25 August 1835 is the History Center's date, quoted on the ACGSI timeline; the year 1835 is agreed by every record-based source in hand, but no contemporaneous primary record for the 25 August date was quoted in hand, so the exact day rests on the accounts cited. The parent bank was established in 1833, its bill drafted by Samuel Hanna as chairman of the committee on state banks and enacted 28 January 1834, and a Fort Wayne branch was added in 1835.

Founders: Indiana General Assembly (parent bank); Fort Wayne branch organisers named in the History Center account as Allen Hamilton (branch president), Hugh McCulloch (cashier), and directors William Rockhill, Asa Fairfield, Jesse Vermilyea, Francis Comparet and William G. Ewing, among others.

What it did: It was Fort Wayne's first established banking institution, ending reliance on banks in the Ohio River Valley and the eastern states. As a branch of the state-chartered system it issued notes, took deposits and lent, and, in the McCulloch account, was run under the system's searching branch examinations.

Course: Hugh McCulloch, a lawyer with no prior banking experience who had begun practice in Fort Wayne in 1833, was appointed cashier and manager of the Fort Wayne branch in October 1835. CONFLICT — end of McCulloch's branch tenure: the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica and the National Park Service nomination for the McCulloch House give cashier/manager 1835 to 1857, while Indiana University's Lilly Library summary gives director 1835 to 1856 and president of the successor bank 1856 to 1863. The difference is a transition year, not a clean break: the old branches stopped discounting and began calling in circulation on 1 January 1855, and the successor's branches opened 1 January 1857, largely with the same officers and premises. CONFLICT — spelling: some secondary summaries render the drafter "Samuel Hannah"; Fort Wayne record-based sources give "Samuel Hanna", used here. CONFLICT — location, UNRESOLVED: the News-Sentinel city history (19 October 1993) puts the city's first bank "on the southwest corner of Main and Clinton streets", while a Business People street-history account, citing the Indiana Quarterly Magazine of History (1905) and other sources, and the Fort Wayne Public Library's 1975 Columbia Street story both put the first bank, a branch of the State Bank of Indiana, at Francis Comparet's home on the south side of Columbia Street, between Clinton and Calhoun. No source in hand proves a move from one site to the other, and no reconciliation is invented here; Comparet was a branch director, which makes an early home-based operation plausible, but the Main and Clinton site is not disproved either. Both sites are therefore carried, flagged, until a deed, directory or contemporary advertisement settles the sequence.

Fate: Parent charter expiry 1 January 1859 — , with an operational handover in 1857. The old State Bank of Indiana wound down from 1855 and its charter expired in 1859; the successor, the privately owned Bank of the State of Indiana, chartered in 1855 over the governor's veto, opened its branches 1 January 1857 with McCulloch as its first president. McCulloch held that presidency until April 1863, when he resigned to become Comptroller of the Currency. CONFLICT — successor name: the ACGSI/History Center timeline calls the successor the "privately held Second Bank of Indiana"; the bank-history literature distinguishes it as the Bank of the State of Indiana, a private bank in which the state was not a stockholder. These are variant names for the same successor in the sources in hand, not two separate successors. The successor itself later liquidated in 1865, after McCulloch had left; the Fort Wayne branch's separate identity ends with the 1857 handover, not in 1863.

Sources:

1. News-Sentinel city history, "In 1835, the city's first bank, a branch of the State Bank of Indiana, opened on the southwest corner of Main and Clinton streets" — http://egen.fortwayne.com/ns/projects/history/rhist7.php
2. ACGSI 1830–1839 timeline, quoting the History Center's 25 August 1835 branch date and branch principals — https://www.acgsi.org/genweb/county/timeline/1830s-timeline-of-allen-county-indiana.html
3. Business People, "The first bank organized in Fort Wayne, a branch of the State Bank of Indiana, was located at Comparet's home on the south side of Columbia Street"
4. Fort Wayne Public Library Bicentennial, The Columbia Street Story (1975), placing the first banking in Comparet's home on the south side of Columbia Street — https://dn721503.ca.archive.org/0/items/columbiastreetst00bate/columbiastreetst00bate.pdf
5. Slocum and Robertson, History of the Maumee River Basin (1905), on Hanna drafting the charter approved 28 January 1834 and a branch "at once established in Fort Wayne" — https://ldsgenealogy.com/IN/books/History-of-the-Maumee-River-basin-Allen-County-Indiana-part-6.htm
6. CoinWorld on the two similarly named banks, the 1855/1857/1859 closing-date problem, and the successor opening 1 January 1857 — https://www.coinworld.com/news/paper-money/confusing-names-you-can-bank-on-collecting-paper.html
7. Indiana Historical Bureau marker, State Bank of Indiana (New Albany branch), chartered 1834 — https://www.in.gov/history/state-historical-markers/find-a-marker/state-bank-of-indiana/
8. Indiana University Lilly Library, McCulloch manuscripts biographical note — https://archives.iu.edu/catalog/InU-Li-VAD6742
9. Secondary summary of McCulloch, Men and Measures of Half a Century (1888), on his October 1835 appointment and 1857 succession as president — https://www.chestofbooks.com.stason.org/finance/banking/Romance-Tragedy/Chapter-III-Hugh-Mcculloch.html
10. State Bank of Indiana summary, used as a lead only and checked against the record-based sources above — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Bank_of_Indiana