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THE NORTH · LIMA ROAD (U.S. 27 / STATE ROAD 3) AND COLDWATER ROAD
Lima Road is Fort Wayne's plank road made good. Local historian Samuel Hanna's generation built plank roads out of the new city — Input Fort Wayne's transportation history names Lima Road among them, "early highways leading to nearby communities" — and the road north toward Lima, Ohio, became in turn State Road 3 and the northern leg of U.S. 27, the federal highway whose southern end is Miami and whose northern terminus, since the 2002 truncation of its Michigan mileage, is Fort Wayne itself. Through the city, U.S. 27 comes up Clinton Street and leaves by Lima Road to the I-69 interchange. The corridor's character is the postwar retail strip: shopping centers, auto-oriented commerce and big boxes strung along a widened state highway, with the City creating Lima Road economic development areas in 2005 (Lima Road–Ley Road) and 2007 (Lima Wells Fernhill) to capture and reinvest the strip's value, and the 2026 Northeast Indiana Retail Market Report still treating the Lima Road corridor as an active growth line, with a proposed Kroger at Lima and Hathaway and change expected on the county-owned Byron Health Center land.
Coldwater Road is Lima's parallel one mile east: a four-lane county arterial running from Clinton Street north through the Coliseum Boulevard retail zone to I-69 and beyond. It once carried a state number of its own — State Road 327 ran along Coldwater from U.S. 27 north to Garrett before the designation was pulled back to its present DeKalb County stub — and its modern role is to feed the north side's mall ground: Coldwater crosses SR 930 (Coliseum Boulevard) inside the retail zone west of Glenbrook Square, carries chain groceries in the directory record from the 1970s forward (Shoppers Choice at 3809 Coldwater in 1972; Cub Foods at 5519 and Scott's at 10201 by 1990), and has trails on both sides in its northern reach, from Dupont Road south to Ludwig Road, as part of the trail network the Bike Trails section treats.
Sources: Input Fort Wayne, "How we got here: The role of transportation in Fort Wayne's growth" (June 16, 2026) — Hanna-era plank roads; AARoads, U.S. Route 27 and State Road 930 guides (U.S. 27 terminus; SR 327 on Coldwater); City of Fort Wayne Redevelopment Commission record (Lima Road EDAs, 2005 and 2007), in the Hatfield Road EDA resolution (2013); 2026 Northeast Indiana Retail Market Report (Lima Road corridor); Groceteria, Fort Wayne chain grocery locations, 1925–2015 (Coldwater Road entries).