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THE SOUTHWEST · OLD TRAIL ROAD / BLUFFTON ROAD (STATE ROAD 1)
Waynedale's corridor is really two roads laid one over the other. The older is Old Trail Road. A City preservation account describes Old Trail as beginning as a Native American and pioneer trail, later a nineteenth-century highway known as the Bluffton Plank Road and then the Fort Wayne to Bluffton Road. It was the original route of Indiana State Road 1, the state highway south to Bluffton, and the intersection of Old Trail with Lower Huntington Road was the original crossroads of the community Abner Elzey bought and platted in 1921 — 110 acres of lots and streets between McArthur Drive, Old Trail Road, Lower Huntington Road and Beaty Avenue. Churchward's blacksmith shop stood at that crossroads, where travelers on the road south could get a horse shod or a wagon mended before the long journey; businesses gathered along Old Trail and Lower Huntington through the 1930s as Elzey's plat filled with houses.
Around 1940 — the City's Bluffton/Lower Huntington Corridor Improvement Plan dates the change to the state highway reconstruction era, and a Waynedale News account ties it to the construction period of Baer Field — State Road 1 was rerouted east onto a straighter, wider alignment built for truck traffic. That new road is Bluffton Road. The old segment kept the name Old Trail Road, and the traffic, and then the commerce, followed the new line: development expanded north of Lower Huntington Road in the 1950s and east toward Winchester Road by the 1960s, leaving the original crossroads as the quieter, older heart of the community. Waynedale itself was annexed by Fort Wayne in 1957 — the council vote came June 25, 1957, and the annexation took effect September 9, 1957, a distinction the Neighborhoods section keeps — and its two corridors have served as the business center of the southwest side ever since: the plan describes Bluffton and Lower Huntington as providing "a variety of long-standing local businesses and an increasing number of national chain establishments" to the neighborhoods around them.
The corridor is planned for, formally, twice over. The Bluffton/Lower Huntington Corridor Improvement Plan, covering roughly the 6400 to 7600 blocks of Bluffton Road and the 2200 to 2700 blocks of Lower Huntington Road, was adopted as an amendment to the Plan-it Allen Comprehensive Plan by resolution R-17-10-01 in the fall of 2017, with the Waynedale Business Chamber among its working partners. The larger Waynedale 2040 neighborhood plan followed, adopted June 9, 2026. The old road still reads as the older place: funeral home, churches and the crossroads lots on Old Trail; the through traffic and the chains on Bluffton.
Sources: City of Fort Wayne, Bluffton/Lower Huntington Corridor Improvement Plan (adopted into Plan-it Allen, Res. R-17-10-01, 2017), History and Existing Conditions; The Waynedale News, "How Neighborhoods Came Together To Make A Community" (Feb. 13, 2026) and "The Next Dimension in Waynedale" (May 12, 2004); City of Fort Wayne, Waynedale 2040 (adopted June 9, 2026).