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Documented in 1838 — a single-mention firm
Founded: No founding record has been found. Like Paige & Fry, the firm is documented once, in John W. Dawson's eyewitness description of Fort Wayne in 1838: "Captain Bourie and John B. Peltier had a fine store northwest of Calhoun and Columbia streets; Taylor, Freeman & Company, another on the northwest corner; Captain Ben Smith, a grocery, as then called — a saloon now — on the southeast corner."
What it did: A general store — one of the handful of stores that made up the town's whole commercial district at Calhoun and Columbia in 1838, alongside Bourie & Peltier's store (carried in the Businesses section).
Course and fate: No second mention has been found in the sources searched, and the partners behind the firm name are not identified there. An R. W. Taylor appears in Fort Wayne business records of the 1850s (a heavy-hardware advertisement of September 1855; later a grain firm, R. W. Taylor Co.), but no source connects him to this 1838 firm, and the connection is not made here.
Sources:
- John W. Dawson, Charcoal Sketches of Old Times in Fort Wayne, No. IV, Fort Wayne Daily Sentinel, 15 March 1872 (1959 Historical Society reprint) — the 1838 description.
- Fort Wayne Sentinel, 16 August 1856 (advertisement of R. W. Taylor, heavy hardware, dated September 1855) and Pioneers Resting in Historic Lindenwood (1989), Solomon Bash sketch (R. W. Taylor Co., grain) — cited only to mark what is not connected.