Fort Wayne's Communities: The Peoples Who Built the City

Communities · the peoples of Fort Wayne

Fort Wayne was built by peoples who arrived in waves and built together: each community in this record came from somewhere, at a datable time, for reasons the record keeps, and left institutions behind it — churches and singing societies, newspapers and settlement houses, temples, groceries, festivals, and in one case an entire second founding of the city's population. This section tells that story community by community, oldest first. The political and narrative history underneath it — Kekionga, the canal, the factories, the wars — is told in the Story and the sections that follow it, and is pointed to here rather than retold. Congregations as institutions belong to the Religion section; individual lives belong to the People record; what belongs here is the peoples themselves. Population figures are dated and sourced as they are given, because a community's count in 1900 and its count in 2024 are different facts. Where the record for a community is thin, the thinness is stated plainly.

The Miami at Kekionga · the first community

MYAAMIAKI · THE PEOPLE OF THE PORTAGE

The first community at the three rivers was the Miami nation — Myaamiaki, in their own language — whose principal town, Kekionga, stood at the confluence of the St. Joseph, St. Marys, and Maumee and commanded the portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi watershed. Kekionga's life as a living town — its chiefs, its confederacy, its wars, and the treaties that stripped its land — is the opening of the Story, and is told there. What belongs to this record is the community's line after the city rose on its ground. The removals came in stages: after the last treaties, most of the Miami were forced west in 1846, to Kansas and then, in the 1870s, to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. Families who held private allotments of land were permitted to remain in Indiana, and their descendants maintain a tribal government of their own, the Miami Nation of Indiana, headquartered at Peru — which sought recognition from the State of Indiana and the federal government and received it from neither: federal acknowledgment was denied in 1992 (affirmed by the Seventh Circuit in 2001, certiorari denied 2002), the Indiana state-recognition bills introduced from 2011 onward died in committee, and the proclamations honoring the Nation from individual cities, including Peru and Wabash, are honors, not recognition.

The federally recognized Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, headquartered at Miami, Oklahoma, has in this century re-established a physical presence in the ancestral homeland. In 2015 the tribe bought a ten-acre property in Fort Wayne to house a Cultural Resources Extension Office, a place for tribal citizens in the lower Great Lakes region to reconnect with their history, language, and culture; in 2021 it moved to a larger forty-five-acre property northwest of the city. Indiana's historic preservation office lists the tribe among the removed nations that keep trust land and an office in the state. The tribe's language-revival work, carried on with Miami University through the Myaamia Center, is the modern continuation of the community that named the ground the city stands on.

Sources: Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Historic Preservation & Archaeology, "Native Americans" (tribal presence and the Fort Wayne Cultural Resource Extension Office); the Associated Press's America at 250 reporting on the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma's Fort Wayne land purchases (2015, 2021); the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Myaamia Center. Kekionga's own history is in the Story.

The French, and the first American settlers

TRADERS FIRST · THEN A SECOND FRENCH WAVE FROM ALSACE

Fort Wayne's second community was French. French traders lived among the Miami at Kekionga from the first years of the 1700s — the trading post established there under Jean Baptiste Bissot, sieur de Vincennes, made the town a French place as well as a Miami one — and French-speaking trading families, many of them joined to Miami families by marriage, persisted through the British takeover and into the American period. The family of Jean Baptiste de Richardville, the Miami chief whose 1827 house still stands, is the standing example; the fur trade's whole record is in the Story and the Business record. The American settler community that followed the fort of 1794, and the platting of the town in 1823, likewise belong to the Story. One later French wave, though, is a community story of its own. In the 1830s a group of French families from Alsace-Lorraine settled about six miles north of Fort Wayne in what is now Washington Township, in a settlement known variously as "New France," "Académie," and "St. Vincent's." Their permanent legacies stand in the record: St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church, Sacred Heart Academy, the Centlivre Brewery, and the Schanz Photography Studio.

Sources: The History Center, "Fabric of the Fort" (December 2021, the Alsace-Lorraine community); the Story and Business sections for the fur-trade community.

The Germans · a most German town

THE DEFINING COMMUNITY OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CITY

No immigrant people shaped Fort Wayne as the Germans did. The city recruited them deliberately: land agent Henry Rudisill, himself a second-generation German American who arrived in 1829, encouraged German settlement, and from the canal era forward the Germans came — farmers, craftsmen, brewers, merchants — until the Chicago Tribune could routinely describe Fort Wayne in the 1890s as "a most German town." The local historian Bert Griswold claimed in 1915 that about eighty percent of the city's population was German; the 1913–14 Griswold-Phelps handbook advertised the city as "sixty per cent. German"; the harder census arithmetic of 1890 counts German-born residents at 8.41 percent of Allen County but 72.55 percent of its foreign-born, with the German-descended share of the whole population far larger. German was heard in sermons and classrooms, on street signs — Main Street was also Haupt Strasse — and on the street. When Indiana adopted its 1851 constitution, five thousand copies, a tenth of the printing, were published in German.

The community's institutions were built to last. The Fort Wayne Turnverein Vorwärts, the gymnastic society, dates to 1865. The singing societies came on October 4, 1869, when the Sängerbund was organized; eight choruses in time — Sängerbund, Eintracht, Concordia, Teutonia, Germania, Frohsinn, Liedertafel, and the Männer Gesangverein — combined in 1899 as the Concordia Gesangverein, and the line runs unbroken to today's Fort Wayne Männerchor/Damenchor, the second-oldest German singing society in Indiana, which still sings its music in German. Germania Park, on the east bank of the St. Joseph River in St. Joseph Township, was the community's great outdoor gathering ground — ten thousand people came to Robinson Park for a German Day singing competition in 1897 — and the Fort Wayne Sport Club, founded in 1927 by German soccer players, carries the athletic tradition still. The churches and parochial schools that anchored German Fort Wayne, Catholic, Lutheran, and Methodist, are in the Religion and Schools records. The German skilled workers were also an industrial fact: when Theodore Thieme opened Wayne Knitting Mills, he recruited hosiery workers from Chemnitz wholesale — "an entire German town was moved to Fort Wayne," in the News-Sentinel's phrase — a chapter told in the Business record.

The German-language press ran for eighty-four years. Indiana's first German-language newspaper, Der Deutsche Beobachter von Indiana, was published at Fort Wayne in 1843, out of the Sentinel's office and edited by Dr. Charles Schmitz. The Williams directory of 1858–59 carried the Staats-Zeitung's boast of a circulation larger than any other German paper in the state. The Demokrat followed in 1876, the Catholic weekly Weltbürger in 1883, and by the 1890s three German dailies were hawked in the city. The Freie Presse-Staats-Zeitung, formed by merger in 1908, was one of the only German-language papers in Indiana to survive the First World War; it published until 1927.

The war was the community's trauma. Between sixty and seventy percent of Allen County was of German descent in 1914–19, and strength in numbers did not protect it: wartime pressure for Anglo conformity bore down on the language in homes, churches, and schools. On May 31, 1918, the German-American National Bank renamed itself the Lincoln National Bank. In February and March 1919 the Indiana legislature banned the teaching of German in every school in the state, public, private, and parochial. Federal investigators of the Bureau of Investigation kept files — the vast "Old German Files" — on German Americans deemed suspicious, Fort Wayne residents among them. The German Fort Wayne that emerged from 1919 was quieter and more private, and its public culture never again spoke German on the street. What survived, survived as heritage: Germanfest, begun in 1981 and now among the city's signature festivals, the German Heritage Society that grew out of the festival in the 1980s, the sister-city bond with Gera, Germany, established in 1992, and a German ancestry that remains the largest single strain in the city's population.

Sources: Nancy Brown, "Challenging Economic Borders: Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Chemnitz, Germany," Indiana Magazine of History 112 (March 2016); Jim Sack, "The Germans in Fort Wayne," in Beatty, ed., History of Fort Wayne & Allen County; Cynthia Moothart O'Bannon, "WWI Altered the German Accent of Allen County," News-Sentinel; Mark Rogers, "Wir Trinken und Tanzen im Germania Park," Old Fort News 60 (1997); the Allen County Genealogical Society's German heritage and newspapers compilations; the Fort Wayne Männerchor/Damenchor's own history.

The Irish · the canal builders

IRISHTOWN · SOUTH OF THE TRACKS

The Irish were present from the city's American beginning — some of its founding names, Hanna and Hamilton among them, were Irish or Irish-descended, and many of the earliest Protestant settlers called themselves Scotch-Irish. The community's mass, though, arrived with the canal. In the middle 1830s, one to two thousand laborers, a great share of them Irish immigrants, were digging the Wabash and Erie Canal's Fort Wayne-to-Huntington leg, at wages of ten dollars a month in 1832 rising to thirteen by 1837. The canal workforce's internal war — Catholic Corkonians against Protestant Fardowns, which came to a head in July 1835 — is told in the Folklore record. What the Irish built, many of them then stayed to inhabit: by 1850, the 425 Irish-born residents of Allen County held $239,000 worth of property.

The community's geography was the south side. The neighborhood immediately south of the Pennsylvania Railroad shops, between Calhoun and Fairfield, became Irish Town, where railroad and machine-shop work kept Irish families for generations. Its parish, St. Patrick's, was organized in 1889 — its school had opened in 1886 for the children who lived "south of the tracks" — and its church rose on Harrison Street in 1890–91; the congregation's own history is in the Religion record. The Irish climbed as they settled: discriminated against in the early years — "Irish Need Not Apply," in the recollection of local Irish-history research — they produced, by the early twentieth century, established business and civic leaders, and the community's most famous daughters, the classical scholar Edith Hamilton and her sister, the public-health pioneer Dr. Alice Hamilton, carry its name in the People record. The parish tells the community's later story in one fact: St. Patrick's, the Irish parish of Irish Town, is today a largely Hispanic congregation, the newest immigrant community worshipping where an older one began.

Sources: Lynne McKenna Frazier, "Irish Canal Diggers Built Prosperity," News-Sentinel (drawing on Charles Poinsatte, Fort Wayne During the Canal Era); Joshua Schipper, "Irish Immigrants Left Their Mark Building the Wabash-Erie Canal," Fort Wayne Media Collaborative (October 4, 2022); The History Center, "Fabric of the Fort" (January 2022, the Irish).

African American Fort Wayne

THE EAST SIDE COMMUNITY · FROM THE FORTS TO THE PRESENT

The first known Black residents of the three rivers came with the American forts — as enslaved people, servants, soldiers, and laborers. In the 1830s through the 1850s, free Black settlers and freedom seekers escaping slavery formed the first established families of an enduring community, and in 1849 those families founded Fort Wayne's African Methodist Episcopal congregation, the community's first institution and the ancestor of Turner Chapel AME, whose own record is in the Religion section. By the turn of the twentieth century Black Fort Wayners worked in industry, the semi-skilled professions, and domestic service, and owned and operated businesses of their own.

The community's organizing center for a century stood on Douglas Avenue. In 1920, Black Fort Wayners founded the Phyllis Wheatley Social Center — named for the poet Phillis Wheatley — as the recreational and social hub of Black Fort Wayne, their association making its home the Phyllis Wheatley Community Center. Funded at first through the National Recreation Association and from 1925 by the Fort Wayne Community Chest, the center affiliated with the National Urban League in 1930. In the Depression it ran an annex at 503 East Breckenridge Street that sheltered as many as forty homeless Black men a night and served an average of seventy-five meals a day. After a National Urban League study in 1948, the association took the Urban League's name outright on October 1, 1949, and the Fort Wayne Urban League works today from 2135 South Hanna Street. The fight the Wheatley Center and the League waged for factory jobs is told in Peggy Seigel's study of the period; the school-desegregation fight is in the Schools record; and John Nuckols, the community's first councilman, is in the Government record.

Fort Wayne's chapter of the Great Migration came late and then all at once. Labor shortages in 1917–18 had already induced some manufacturers to recruit Black workers from the South, but in the 1920s the city's business and civic leaders hoped to stem Black in-migration as part of their strategy for attracting new industry, and the community stayed small. War production broke the barrier: the Black population grew from 2,517 in 1940 — 2.1 percent of the city — to 5,294 in 1950 and 11,645 in 1960, 7.2 percent of the whole. General Electric and International Harvester were the first Fort Wayne employers to hire Black workers in sizable numbers, men in late 1942 and women by mid-1943, and Iwan Morgan's study of the period shows the two fights that followed — for jobs, and for housing, as practice confined the growing community largely to the near southeast side: the East Central neighborhood and the Hanna Street corridor, where its institutions stand. In 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the Scottish Rite Auditorium, in what the History Center calls the most publicly visible civil-rights effort in the city to that point.

The community kept its own record. The Coffee Break served it in the 1960s; Frost Illustrated, founded in 1968 by publisher Edward N. Smith — "News & Views of African Americans" — ran for forty-nine years as Fort Wayne's oldest weekly before its final issue in October 2017; and the Fort Wayne Ink Spot, founded by John Dortch with its first issue on March 12, 2018, succeeded it as the only Black-owned newspaper in northeast Indiana. In 1975 two teachers, Hana L. Stith and Miles Edwards, began working with the county historical museum to collect a history no institution had preserved. The African/African-American Historical Society they built opened its museum on February 1, 2000, at 436 East Douglas Avenue — in the former Phyllis Wheatley Center building, which had also been the Urban League's first office. Stith, among the first Black teachers hired by Fort Wayne Community Schools and the museum's founder and curator, died in 2018; the museum, run by volunteers on a budget the Journal Gazette put at under $5,000 a year, is seeking historic designations for the Wheatley Center building itself.

Sources: The History Center, "Fabric of the Fort" (February 2022, "Timeline of Progress: Black Americans in Fort Wayne"); Iwan W. Morgan, "Latecomers to the Industrial City: African Americans, Jobs, and Housing in Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1940–1960," Indiana Magazine of History 95 (March 1999); Peggy Seigel, "Pushing the Color Line: Race and Employment in Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1933–1963," Indiana Magazine of History 104 (September 2008); the Fort Wayne Urban League's published history; ARCH Fort Wayne on the Wheatley Center building; the Journal Gazette (October 30, 2026) on the museum.

The Jewish community

INDIANA'S FIRST JEWISH COMMUNITY · GERMAN-SPEAKING, THEN MORE

Jewish presence at the three rivers is on record as early as 1764, when a trader known to the record as "Mr. Levi" passed through. The first known Jewish resident was John Jacob Hayes, appointed by President Monroe as Indian agent, who lived at Fort Wayne from 1820 to 1823. The community proper was founded by German Jewish immigrants of the 1830s and 1840s, who came as peddlers, merchants, and craftsmen and built the city's early retail trade: Sigmund Redelsheimer, arrived 1839, kept a general store on Columbia Street in partnership with Abraham Oppenheimer; Isaac Lauferty, arrived 1844, built a clothing store into a private bank; Frederick Nirdlinger's New York Emporium grew into one of the largest clothing stores in the city. The merchants' houses belong to the Business record; the community they formed belongs here.

On October 13, 1848, the community bought its first burial ground, for two hundred dollars, beside what is now McCulloch Park, and on October 26 it organized the Society for Visiting the Sick and Burying the Dead — the first Jewish congregation in Indiana, ancestor of Congregation Achduth Vesholom, whose institutional history is in the Religion record. It was a German community: its records were kept in German for the first thirty years, and it met in Nirdlinger's home until 1859. Its women organized the Ladies' Hebrew Benevolent Society in 1861, which aided Union soldiers of all faiths; its men organized the Emek Beracha Lodge of B'nai B'rith in 1865. The record also holds the hostility the community met: in 1849 the Sentinel's editor, Thomas Tigar, published a report blaming an outbreak of smallpox on Jewish peddlers. By 1880 Fort Wayne's Jews lived in comfortable homes on the near west side near their temple, and in the 1890s a second immigration, from Russia, Poland, Romania, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, formed new congregations of its own — B'nai Israel in 1894 and, later, B'nai Jacob.

In 1921 the community organized the Fort Wayne Jewish Federation, a welfare and relief body that coordinated the work and fundraising of the whole community; the Ladies' Hebrew Benevolent Society disbanded the same year, its philanthropy passing to the Federation. By 1939 the Federation's executive director was Joseph Levine, who went on to found the Indiana Jewish Historical Society. The community's civic habit persisted across two centuries: in February 2022 the Jewish community presented Catholic Charities with $21,868 it had raised to help resettle Fort Wayne's newest refugees, the Afghans. In 2019 Congregations Achduth Vesholom and B'nai Jacob voted to merge — one congregation with two traditions — on the Rifkin Campus at 5200 Old Mill Road, where the Federation also makes its home.

Sources: Indiana Historical Society / Indiana Jewish Heritage Initiative, "Allen County History"; the Jewish Federation of Fort Wayne's published history; The History Center, "Fabric of the Fort" (October 2021, the Jewish community); the Allen County Genealogical Society's Jewish people compilation; Congregation Achduth Vesholom's bulletin history (August 2019); the Temple's Afghan resettlement report (February 2022).

The peoples of the Ottoman world · Greeks, Macedonians, Syrians, Romanians

SMALLER COMMUNITIES OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

A family of smaller communities arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the lands of the Ottoman Empire and its successor states — Lebanese and Syrians, Romanians, Macedonians, and Greeks, most of them Christians of Eastern and Orthodox traditions, who came as the empire declined and fell. Greek immigrants reached Fort Wayne in the early twentieth century and built the community whose parish, Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church — its school, its AHEPA chapter, its Philoptochos sisterhood — is in the Religion record; its public face is the Fort Wayne Greek Festival, running some forty years, and in October 2025 the Archbishop of America himself presided at the consecration of the parish's church. The Macedonian Patriotic Organization, founded at Fort Wayne in 1922, began the effort after the Second World War that produced the city's Macedonian-Bulgarian Orthodox church, today's St. Nicholas Cathedral. The Italian community was by comparison the European people that left the least institutional record here: Italian names run through the railroad and factory workforce, but in the sources this section rests on, Fort Wayne's Italians built no parish, society, or festival of their own that left a record — the honest measure of the smallest of the city's European communities.

Sources: The History Center, "Fabric of the Fort" (November 2021, the Ottoman-era communities); the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, Archbishop Elpidophoros's remarks at Holy Trinity, Fort Wayne (October 25, 2025); Parish Path's Indiana Orthodox survey (the Macedonian Patriotic Organization, 1922); the Fort Wayne Greek Festival.

The Appalachian migration

THE HILLBILLY HIGHWAY'S INDIANA STOP · 1940–1970

Fort Wayne's least counted community arrived from inside the United States. In the decades historians call the Hillbilly Highway, roughly 1940 to 1970, millions of Appalachians left the coalfields and hill farms of Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Ohio for the factory cities of the Midwest; Fort Wayne, with its General Electric and International Harvester plants hiring through the war years and after, is counted in the scholarship among the cities that received a smaller but significant share of the migration. The migrants came the way migrants do — recruited by employers, then by kin, one family's move becoming a chain. The community left few institutions of its own in the record reached for this section: no Appalachian association, hall, or festival appears in the sources, and no reliable count of Appalachian Fort Wayne exists, a gap stated plainly. What the record does hold is texture: a 2025 study in the Journal of Appalachian Studies follows the funerary photographs of the Walters and Fletcher families between Breathitt County, Kentucky, and Fort Wayne — paper evidence of a community that lived in two places at once, burying its dead with pictures sent down the highway both ways.

Sources: the Urban Appalachians scholarship and Max Fraser, Hillbilly Highway (2023), for the migration and Fort Wayne's place in it; Angela McClanahan, "Funerary Photographs as Enduring Kinship and Community Ties," Journal of Appalachian Studies 31 (2025), for the Breathitt County–Fort Wayne families.

Latino Fort Wayne

FROM PEDRO PAN TO A TENTH OF THE CITY

Mexican railroad workers were the first Latino presence the record keeps: the National Museum of Mexican Art's Rieles y Raíces project preserves the record of Francisca Dimas Garcia, a Mexican woman listed in a 1950 Fort Wayne city directory as an engine wiper at the Nickel Plate Road yard, who organized folkloric dance groups in the community — one worker's paper trail for a workforce the record otherwise barely kept. The community's first organized arrival came by air, not rail. In July 1961, twenty-three Cuban teenage boys were sent to Saint Vincent Villa in Fort Wayne under Operation Pedro Pan, the Catholic Charities effort that brought unaccompanied Cuban children out of Castro's Cuba; they attended Central Catholic High School, and among them were Carlos Rozas, later a diocesan vicar, and Felipe Estevez, later Bishop of St. Augustine. A Cuban professor, Dr. Graciela Beecher, arrived the same year to teach at Saint Francis College and spent her life in Fort Wayne advocating for Cuban Americans; the ballplayer Isabel Álvarez had preceded them all, a Cuban on the Fort Wayne Daisies (her playing record is in the Sports record). The Cuban community grew twenty-five percent by 2000, the Rodriguez family of the Caliente Cuban Café among its later arrivals.

From those small beginnings the Latino community became one of the city's largest. The census series states the growth: Hispanic or Latino residents were 7.96 percent of Fort Wayne in 2010 — 6.1 percent Mexican, with Puerto Rican and Guatemalan communities behind — and the city's own 2016 estimate put the community near 26,000 people, close to a tenth of the population, with about eighteen percent of Fort Wayne Community Schools students Hispanic. The American Community Survey for 2020–2024 puts the share at 10.6 percent. Mexico stands first among the countries of origin of the region's immigrants, at 28.9 percent in 2016. The institutions followed the numbers: the Greater Fort Wayne Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, whose president in 2013 was Palermo Galindo — who had left Mexico at fifteen in 1984 and served from 2009 as the city's community liaison — and the TinCaps' partnership with the chamber on the Manzanas Luchadoras games. St. Patrick's Church, built for the Irish of Irish Town, now serves a largely Hispanic parish: Fort Wayne's immigrant succession told in one building.

Sources: The History Center, "Fabric of the Fort" (April 2022, "Seeking Refuge: Cuban Immigrants in the Summit City"); the National Museum of Mexican Art, Rieles y Raíces (the Francisca Dimas Garcia record); U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Census and American Community Survey 2020–2024 (QuickFacts, Fort Wayne); the City of Fort Wayne's 2016 estimate as published with the TinCaps (November 2019); New Americans in Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana (the 2016 immigrant-origin figures and Galindo's biography); Fort Wayne Media Collaborative on St. Patrick Parish.

The refugee city begins · the Southeast Asians of 1975

CATHOLIC CHARITIES' LINE OPENS · VIETNAMESE AND LAOTIAN FORT WAYNE

Modern Fort Wayne was remade by a decision repeated for fifty years: to receive refugees. Beginning in 1975, as the Vietnam War ended, thousands of refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Burma began arriving in Fort Wayne under the sponsorship system run by Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend — the agency that remains, a half-century later, the only federal resettlement agency in northern Indiana. Fort Wayne was considered one of the most organized refugee cities in the country: Catholic Charities ran orientation sessions for the local families who sponsored the newcomers and lodged arrivals temporarily in makeshift apartments on the third floor of the old Central Catholic High School. The Laotian community that began arriving in the late 1970s built its temple, Wat Lao Samakky, on Decatur Road; the businesses of the first years — the Laotian Grocery on South Calhoun Street, the Saigon Restaurant, still a Fort Wayne staple — announced that the newcomers had come to stay. The machinery built for the Vietnamese and Laotians of 1975 — one resettlement agency, church and family sponsors, a city practiced at receiving — is the machinery every later community in this record arrived through.

Sources: The History Center, "Fabric of the Fort" (May 2022, "Friendship and Freedom: Asian Heritage in Fort Wayne"); the Journal Gazette on Fort Wayne's Buddhist temples (April 29, 2007); Catholic Charities of Fort Wayne-South Bend (its status as northern Indiana's federal resettlement agency).

Burmese Fort Wayne

THE LARGEST BURMESE COMMUNITY SHARE IN AMERICA

When Burma's military crushed the pro-democracy uprising of 1988, the exiles who scattered across the world found, in Fort Wayne, an improbable capital. The city had been a primary resettlement site since the first Burmese refugees arrived in 1991, sponsored through Catholic Charities — the official resettlement agency — with the help of Friends of Burma, the support organization co-founded by Diana Sowards. The counts, each dated, state the growth. Catholic Charities settled 768 Burmese refugees between 1991 and 2006. By 2007 about 3,000 Burmese lived in Fort Wayne, then the largest concentration in the United States. The arrivals peaked in 2007 and 2008, when more than 1,400 came in two years; they slowed to as few as forty in 2012 and ran near three hundred in 2015. By 2016 about 6,000 refugees had been settled since 1991, and the whole community — counting American-born children and the secondary migrants who moved to Fort Wayne from other American cities to join it — was estimated closer to 20,000. The measures differ, and this record keeps them separate: the 2024 American Community Survey counts 9,404 residents of Burmese ancestry in the Fort Wayne metropolitan area, 2.1 percent of the metro population — the highest Burmese share of any metropolitan area in the country.

The community is not one people but several. The first wave, after 1988, was largely ethnic Bamar political exiles, and the scholarship of the migration notes that this post-1988 wave concentrated in Fort Wayne above all American cities. The waves from 2006 forward were drawn from Burma's ethnic minorities, above all Karen Christians from the Thai border camps and Chin from the western hills; the Mon built their own temple at 5824 Decatur Road, down the road from the Laotians'. From 2013, Rohingya Muslims began arriving, and their Fort Wayne community — more than a thousand strong — has been reported as the largest Rohingya community in the United States. The Burmese and Zo Catholics, some fifty extended families, worship at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. The community's geography is the south side: the Buddhist temples on Decatur Road — the Burmese Jetavan Vihara among them — the groceries and restaurants of what National Public Radio in 2012 already called a "Little Burma" neighborhood, and the Burmese Muslim congregation whose Masjid Noor-ul-Islam, opened in 2015, is in the Religion record.

The community built its own scaffolding. From 2008 to 2013 the Burmese Advocacy Center, created and funded by the St. Joseph Community Health Foundation of the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ, ran a one-stop gateway to ten agencies — state assistance, volunteer interpreters, job training — before officials judged it no longer needed. Interpretation itself became a community profession, and the resettlement agency's own leadership came from the community: Nyein Chan, a student leader of the 1988 uprising who fled Burma, became Catholic Charities' director of resettlement services in Fort Wayne. It was Nyein Chan who, on September 25, 2012, introduced Aung San Suu Kyi at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum — twenty-four years and a week after he had last seen her, in a student meeting days before the 1988 crackdown. She had made Fort Wayne a stop on her first American tour in decades for one reason: the size of the community here. Between roughly five and seven thousand people — some five thousand of them Burmese, joined by about a thousand students — heard her speak in Burmese, with English translation on the arena screens. The diaspora's tie to the homeland runs both ways still: in 2025 the Journal Gazette covered a Fort Wayne fundraising visit by Kim Aris, Aung San Suu Kyi's son. A refugee community three decades old is now a settled one, raising a second generation in the Fort Wayne schools — and by the census's arithmetic, the most distinctively Burmese city in America.

Sources: Today's Catholic (October 7, 2007) and the Global Sisters Report / Today's Catholic "Seeking Refuge" series (2018) for the resettlement counts and the Burmese Advocacy Center; the Journal Gazette (April 29, 2007; and as reported in the series above) for the 2007 concentration and the 2007–08 peak; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 (the 9,404 and 2.1 percent figures); Voice of America (September 2012) and National Public Radio (September 24–25, 2012) for the Suu Kyi visit; the Indianapolis Star, via the "Seeking Refuge" series, for the Rohingya community; Visit Fort Wayne for the 1991 first arrivals and Friends of Burma.

The newest Fort Wayners · Congolese, Afghans, Ukrainians

THE LINE CONTINUES · 1998 TO THE PRESENT

The resettlement line that opened in 1975 has never closed. Congolese refugees fleeing the wars of the Democratic Republic of Congo began arriving in the late 1990s; in 2008 Fort Wayne's First Assembly of God began offering French interpretation of its sermons for a small group of refugee families, and in 2009 the largely African-immigrant Restoration Church was launched from that ministry under Pastor Francois Mikobi, himself a refugee of the Congo wars. A Congolese diaspora community existed to be joined: in September 2023 a private sponsor group from Beacon Heights Church of the Brethren, working through the federal Welcome Corps, welcomed a Congolese family that had spent decades in a Tanzanian refugee camp — and connected them, its members reported, to the Congolese community already here. More than 7,000 refugees from around the world have settled in Fort Wayne since 2000 with Catholic Charities' assistance, and more than eighty languages are spoken in the Fort Wayne Community Schools.

When Afghanistan fell in August 2021, Catholic Charities — still northern Indiana's only federal resettlement agency — received its first Afghan client that October, had seventy-five clients by November, and resettled 138 Afghans in all, housing families temporarily in the Cabrini Center, a former nursing home on Noll Avenue named for the patron saint of immigrants; the building passed to the University of Saint Francis in March 2023. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainians joined the rolls. As of August 2025, the agency reported some 1,400 refugees still being served across the diocese, primarily from Myanmar, Ukraine, and Afghanistan — and it reported them in the act of continuing the work after federal resettlement funding was halted in January 2025, on state funds and its own resources. The pattern of a half-century holds: the machinery built for one people's arrival is inherited by the next.

Sources: Assemblies of God News (February 5, 2015) for Restoration Church; Welcome.US and Indiana Public Media (2023–24) for the Welcome Corps sponsorship; Catholic Charities of Fort Wayne-South Bend (March 13, 2023) for the Afghan resettlement and the Cabrini Center; the National Catholic Reporter (August 14, 2025) for the 1,400 served and the funding halt; the Journal Gazette's count of post-2000 resettlement.

So the community record closes where the city itself does not. Fort Wayne has been, in turn, a Miami capital, a French trading town, a German city, an Irish canal town, a factory city that drew Black southerners and Appalachian whites down two different highways, and a refugee city that received Southeast Asians, Burmese, Congolese, Afghans, and Ukrainians through a door opened in 1975. Each people built the institutions the next one used. That succession — not any single arrival — is the community history of Fort Wayne.