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Rotary, 9 January 1915 — the luncheon-club century
Rotary: The Rotary Club of Fort Wayne was established on 9 January 1915, when 35 local business professionals and community leaders held their first meeting at the former Commercial Club on Harrison Street. Its early works, recorded on its state historical marker, read as a civic program in themselves: sponsoring the city's first public swimming pool at Lawton Park; serving as a booster club for Fort Wayne's Central Baseball League team; mentoring newsboys; sponsoring a Boy Scout troop at the County Children's Home; planting a community Victory Garden; facilitating construction of the Irene Byron Sanitarium; and providing leadership to route the Lincoln Highway through Fort Wayne. The club marked its centennial in 2015.
The company it kept: Kiwanis, Lions and Exchange clubs all took root in Fort Wayne in the same decades — the luncheon club was the era's civic engine, and the clubs' fingerprints are on playgrounds, scholarships and the airport names across the 20th-century record elsewhere in this history. Their individual Fort Wayne charter dates were not established from solid local sources and are not asserted; the national founding years are not local facts and are not substituted. The Quest Club (founded 1903, its papers at the Allen County Public Library) belongs to the intellectual rather than the service line and is cross-referenced from the comparison of published histories; the fraternal orders — Masons, Elks, Odd Fellows and their relief funds — carried real benevolent weight in the 19th century and are noted here in brief, their lodge-by-lodge history belonging to a future pass.
Sources:
- Historical Marker Database (hmdb.org), Rotary Club of Fort Wayne marker — 9 January 1915, the 35 founders, the Commercial Club meeting, the early project list.
- Rotary Club of Fort Wayne centennial coverage, 2015.