Fort Wayne Events: The City Calendar, Current and Past

The organisation behind the programme has its own layered history. A first Historic Fort Wayne was established in 1964 and opened the reconstructed site for the Bicentennial in 1976; it disbanded in 1989, and the present Historic Fort Wayne, Inc. — a separate, all-volunteer nonprofit founded in 2004 — runs the fort today (the distinction is “The Old Fort on Spy Run is Anthony Wayne's fort.”'s second point). The season opens with Muster on the St. Marys, a timeline event that puts soldiers of many eras on the same ground (9–10 May in 2026), and runs through the Camp Allen Muster for the Civil War years, Post Miamies for the French era, Fright Night lantern tours in October and a Christmas open house in late November. Events are free, staffed entirely by volunteers and funded by donations.

Sources: Waynedale News, Old Fort event coverage, waynedalenews.com; Clio entry for the Old Fort, theclio.com

The newest of the city's light shows. It debuted on 14 November 2024 and drew more than 97,000 guests over 48 nights in its first season: over a million lights synchronised to music, walk-through access to the field itself, and the “Holiday Express” train on the concourse; nearly 5,000 people came on the opening Saturday alone, and two late-December nights were lost to weather. The 2026 edition is the third, runs 12 November to 2 January, and roughly doubles the display to about two million lights; across its first two years the event has drawn more than 170,000 visitors.

Sources: TinCaps / Minor League Baseball releases, milb.com and 963xke.com

The youngest entry in this band. Wild Lights was brand new in 2025, when the Fort Wayne Zoo and Blue Jacket paired it with the Fantasy of Lights drive-through under the single Fort Wayne Light Fest banner. Its first edition opened on 28 November 2025 and ran to 4 January 2026, beginning at Santa's Cottage inside the zoo. (The zoo's lights have a longer local lineage in one sense: the Fantasy of Lights drive-through, next entry, was itself first set up within the zoo grounds in the 1990s.)

Source: Amusement Today, September 2025, amusementtoday.com

The show began in 1995 — its 30th annual edition ran in 2024 — and was first set up inside the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo grounds before growing out into Franke Park. For most of its life it was an all-volunteer production run under the AWS Foundation; Blue Jacket Inc. took it over in 2015, inheriting about 68 display scenes on a mile-and-a-half loop, and has nearly tripled it: by 2024 it counted 186 scenes, some 750 display pieces and an estimated 3.5 million LED lights over a route approaching three miles, billed by its organisers as the largest nonprofit drive-through light display in the country. The 2021 season drew about 27,300 cars, its second-best year to that point. Proceeds fund Blue Jacket's employment programmes for people with barriers to work, and clients of the programme are hired onto the setup and teardown crews.

Sources: Input Fort Wayne, behind the scenes at Fantasy of Lights, inputfortwayne.com; Blue Jacket Inc. season reports, bluejacketinc.org

The exhibit is the current edition of the Conservatory's long-running holiday showcase. The Foellinger-Freimann Botanical Conservatory, at 1100 S. Calhoun Street, opened in 1983; its Showcase Garden changes with the seasons, and the holiday edition fills it with poinsettias, evergreens and lights each November into January — the 2018 theme was “Victorian Holiday,” the 2026 theme “Silver Bells,” running 21 November 2026 to 3 January 2027. Evening $1 Night Light Display admissions run on selected nights from the eve of Thanksgiving, a dollar-admission tradition the Conservatory keeps through the season.

Sources: City of Fort Wayne, Botanical Conservatory listings and Fun Times guide, cityoffortwayne.in.gov

The two anchor displays are far older than the ceremony that lights them. Wolf & Dessauer, the downtown department store at Calhoun and Washington, began animated Christmas windows in 1928; its 25-foot Merry Christmas wreath, reported at more than 40,000 lights, first hung on the Calhoun Street side in 1937, to sketches by the store's owner, G. Irving Latz, built by Brinkman Signs. Accounts differ on the Santa: the store's historians date both big displays to 1937, while Whatzup's history and the Genealogical Society's timeline put the first lighting of Santa and His Reindeer on 20 November 1940, switched on by Mayor Harry Baals, when it was billed as the nation's second-largest such display. Both datings are in print and both are carried here. The displays went dark for the war years (the 1942–44 blackouts), returned in 1945, and went into storage when the store moved — in 1958 on some accounts, 1959 on others. In 1979 GTE installer Jim Green found Santa in a warehouse; volunteers restored the 155-foot, 24,717-bulb, five-and-a-half-ton display (200 hours of work on a single reindeer), lit one reindeer in 1979 and the whole sign on Thanksgiving eve 1980, on the Fort Wayne National Bank building. It hangs on the PNC tower today, its bulbs since converted to LED, and the Night of Lights crowd is put at 25,000 to 50,000 people.

Sources: Input Fort Wayne, “A Timeless Glow,” inputfortwayne.com; Whatzup, Night of Lights history, whatzup.com; ACGSI, Wolf & Dessauer page, acgsi.org; Barron & Barron, Wolf & Dessauer: Where Fort Wayne Shopped (2011)

On the founding year the sources split, and the split is printed rather than smoothed. The Embassy's own site says “Founded in 1984.” The Embassy Theatre Foundation's history says the Embassadors — the theatre's volunteers — established the first Festival of Trees in 1985, on Barbara Wigham's recommendation, and that it raised $46,000, spent on restoring the front lobby entrances. The festival's own numbering follows 1985: the 40th annual ran in 2024 and the 41st in 2025, which makes 2026 the 42nd, as this entry's heading has it. The 2024 edition set the attendance record, 25,117 visitors over its week; the lobbies of the Embassy and the former Indiana Hotel hold the trees — 64 of them in 2024 — and the festival opens each year as a Night of Lights stop, with the Harrison Street windows lit the same evening.

Sources: Embassy Theatre, Festival of Trees, fwembassytheatre.org; Embassy Theatre Foundation history via CICATOS, cicatos.org; WPTA, 2024 festival results

The festival is run by the Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society in its home, the 1893 Old City Hall Building on Barr Street, and opens on the Night of Lights. The History Center's holiday season also puts the store behind “Johnny Appleseed died in Fort Wayne and lies under the marker in Johnny Appleseed Park.”'s neighbourhood back on display: the Center holds more than 30 animatronic figures from Wolf & Dessauer's Winter WanDerland windows, the animated department-store Christmas windows Fort Wayne queued for in the store's prime.

Source: ACGSI, Wolf & Dessauer page, acgsi.org

The back story, from the record: Wayne's Legion reached the confluence on 17 September 1794, weeks after Fallen Timbers, and Wayne chose the fort's site the next day. The post rose under Col. Jean François Hamtramck near today's Berry and Clay streets — built, its officers reckoned, proof against 24-pounder cannon — and was finished by 17 October. The dedication came early on 22 October 1794, the fourth anniversary of Harmar's Defeat on the same ground (deep record, below): fifteen cannon rounds for the fifteen states, and Hamtramck formally received the fort named for his commander. The garrison was about a hundred men, with families settled around it.

Sources: Fort Wayne (Indiana fort) summary; Allen County Public Library pamphlet on the fort, via Project Gutenberg

When did it start? The festival's own official history says 1974: about twenty vendors along Parnell Avenue, with sponsors including Eckrich, Lincoln Life and the city parks, and Settlers, Inc. — a founding sponsor — still involved today. The City of Fort Wayne's parks history instead lists “1975 — First Johnny Appleseed Festival,” Visit Fort Wayne likewise dates it to 1975 as a Bicentennial warm-up, and Whatzup's count — 49th annual in 2023, 50th in 2024 — also works back to 1975. Both datings stand in print; this record carries both rather than picking one. The festival runs two days over the third full weekend of September across Johnny Appleseed Park and Archer Park, keeps to period practice — 1800s dress, demonstrations, food cooked as in Chapman's time — and at more than 200 booths draws crowds the festival puts above 200,000 and the Genealogical Society at 300,000.

Sources: Johnny Appleseed Festival official history, johnnyappleseedfest.com; City of Fort Wayne Parks & Recreation history; Visit Fort Wayne; ACGSI

The franchise's own line: it began in 1993 as the Fort Wayne Wizards at Memorial Stadium — its first game played at Waterloo on 10 April 1993 — a Minnesota Twins affiliate through 1998 and a San Diego Padres affiliate from 1999 to the present. The move downtown in 2009 brought the new name, honouring the tin pot of the Appleseed legend, and the club marked its first Parkview Field season by winning the 2009 Midwest League championship (the opening of the park is its own entry in the deep record, below). The 2009 title remains the franchise's championship headline.

Sources: Minor League Baseball franchise records; ACGSI, TinCaps page

This entry now records a finished arc, and there is no next edition to note. The first Three Rivers Festival opened on 12 July 1969 at Columbia Street Landing, with a river parade and some 60 events, and drew about 100,000 people. It grew into nine days in mid-July: attendance reported near a million in 1973, and above two million for the 1976 Bicentennial edition, which hosted even an international beer-can collectors' convention. For decades it was billed as Indiana's second-largest festival, built around the parade (in its later years the General Mad Anthony Wayne Parade), Junk Food Alley, the raft race, the bed race and the finale fireworks; it moved to Headwaters Park in 1997 as that ground was completed, sat out 2020 in the pandemic, and in its later years drew about 200,000 people a year. The money never matched the crowds: the festival's federal filings show a $387,193 net loss across the decade ending with its 2020 filing, outspending revenue in seven of the ten years from 2011. The last edition ran 12–20 July 2024, billed as the 55th annual. In February 2025 the board voted to file for bankruptcy, about $300,000 in debt, and cancelled the 2025 festival. One general reference work still ends the festival in 2023 in its summary box; the 2024 edition stands in the local record and is the one printed here. The July weekend did not stay empty — see Big Fort Fest, next entry.

Sources: ACGSI, Three Rivers Festival page; Whatzup, 12 February 2025; The Post & Mail, 18 February 2025; festival history via the Library of Congress Local Legacies programme

The March observances rest on more flood history than the two famous years. The Floods marker by the river records a disastrous flood at Kekionga itself in 1790, from a rapid spring thaw and heavy rain, before any dike existed. The federal flood guide's list of Fort Wayne's four greatest floods runs 1913, 1978, 1982 and 1985: in March 1978, on the melt of the blizzard winter, about 15 percent of the city was inundated and 2,400 of its 190,000 residents were forced out (deep record, below); floods inundated the area again in 1985 and in 1991. The city's flood file also holds 1959, when St. Marys River ice jams forced some 200 evacuations and dynamiting of the ice, and 13 June 1981, when three and a half inches of rain fell in a day — both from the University of Delaware Disaster Research Center's case study of the city's floods. No Fort Wayne flood of 1936 appears in any of these lists; the famous March 1936 floods were Pittsburgh's and New England's, and Indiana's great 1930s flood, January 1937, was an Ohio River event that never touched the three rivers here.

Sources: The Floods historical marker, hmdb.org; FEMA guide 116 (1987) via ACGSI floods page; Phillips, The Fort Wayne Flood: A Case Study, University of Delaware Disaster Research Center WP 73 (1984)

The sequence, as reported at the time: Henry announced a diagnosis of late-stage stomach cancer at a news conference on 26 February 2024, began chemotherapy, and said he intended to stay in office. He died on 28 March 2024, aged 72, four months into the fifth term he had won the previous November; his tenure, from 1 January 2008, was the longest of any Fort Wayne mayor. Deputy Mayor Karl Bandemer served as acting mayor from 28 March to 23 April 2024. The Allen County Democratic caucus met on Saturday 20 April: 92 precinct committee members cast votes, seven candidates stood including state Rep. Phil GiaQuinta, and 6th District Councilwoman Sharon Tucker won on the second round of voting. She was sworn in on 23 April 2024 — the city's first Black mayor, and, in the Journal Gazette reporting carried by IBJ and the Associated Press, its second woman in the office — and serves the balance of Henry's term, to 31 December 2027.

Sources: Indianapolis Business Journal / Associated Press, 21 April 2024, ibj.com; Black Enterprise, 22 April 2024; list of Fort Wayne mayors

The fuller record: Harmar brought some 1,400 men up the Maumee and reached Kekionga on 17 October 1790 to find the Miami towns burned and emptied ahead of him. The army burned what was left — some 20,000 bushels of corn by the campaign's own accounting — and then lost its detachments piecemeal. On 19 October, Col. John Hardin's militia was ambushed near Little Turtle's town on the Eel River, the fight remembered as Hardin's Defeat. On 22 October, Maj. John Wyllys's regulars were cut apart crossing the Maumee in sight of the camp. How many Americans died is stated differently by the sources this record uses, and all three figures are printed: the state history marker puts US killed at 183 for the campaign; the campaign's general-reference summary puts 262 killed and 106 wounded; the narrative history hosted by the History Center gives 129 killed on 22 October alone, against fewer than 50 Miami losses. A red-moon lunar eclipse hung over the night of 22 October. Harmar withdrew down the Maumee; a court of inquiry cleared him; and the defeat set in motion the larger expedition destroyed the next year — the next entry.

Sources: Harmar's Defeat historical marker, hmdb.org; Calloway narrative via the Fort Wayne History Center; Harmar campaign summary

The detail the garrison's own records add: the fort held about 70 to 100 men under Capt. James Rhea, who was drinking through the crisis until his lieutenants — Ostrander, whose name also appears as Ostander, and Curtis — took effective command. On 4 September, at a parley inside the fort, the Potawatomi leader Winamac lunged at Indian agent Benjamin Stickney with a hidden knife; the trader Antoine Bondie knocked the blow aside. The besiegers, some 500 Potawatomi and Miami under Winamac and Five Medals, burned the village buildings and crops around the fort and tried repeatedly to fire the stockade, while the garrison kept the walls wet and answered with howitzers. The Ball State account drawn from Stickney's manuscript counts only two soldiers killed in the siege itself. Harrison marched to the relief with a Kentucky militia force the accounts put between 2,200 and 3,000 men; Winamac withdrew on 12 September as it arrived. Rhea was arrested and allowed to resign, and Harrison then ordered the Miami and Potawatomi villages around the fort destroyed in reprisal.

Sources: History Center Notes & Queries (Castaldi); Ball State University, siege orderly-book project; Siege of Fort Wayne summary

There were two celebrations, eleven years of digging apart. The first section of the canal, Fort Wayne to Huntington, opened with a gala on 4 July 1835: the packet Indiana, Capt. Oliver Fairfield, docked the evening before, Gen. John Tipton spoke, Hugh McCulloch delivered the oration and a public dinner closed the day. (One older journal account dates that opening to 4 July 1836; the canal histories and the dockside marker say 1835, and 1835 is printed here with the conflict noted.) The 1843 dedication of through navigation was the bigger day. Guests began arriving the Saturday before; the Toledo Guards came in on Monday night; at sunrise a cannon captured from a British ship in Perry's Lake Erie victory fired the salute; and Sen. Lewis Cass — a former military governor of this place, entertained at Allen Hamilton's mansion — arrived at six in the morning on a canal boat from Toledo, acknowledged the crowd's ovation, lost his footing on the gangplank and fell into the canal. Cass dried off and delivered the leading address at Swinney's grove; Hugh Hanna was marshal of the day; a banquet with senators and governors closed the evening. The boat Albert S. White made the first through trip, Toledo to Lafayette. At completion the canal ran about 459 miles, Toledo to Evansville — the longest canal in North America. It was abandoned by 1874.

Sources: The Wabash-Erie Canal (canal history, via Internet Archive); Reser, “The Wabash and Erie Canal at Lafayette,” Indiana Magazine of History (1934); Canal Society of Indiana newsletter (2022); Wabash & Erie Canal marker, hmdb.org

The route, stage by stage. Through September 1846 the Myaamia were rounded up by the US Army and held at Peru, on the Wabash. The removal proper began on 6 October 1846: about 500 people were gathered at Peru — 327 of them removed, by the tribally sourced count in the Tribes section — and loaded onto canal boats (three loaded at Peru; five passed Fort Wayne) and carried through Fort Wayne on the Wabash & Erie, then down the Miami & Erie Canal to Cincinnati, by the steamboat Colorado down the Ohio, held three days on Bloody Island at St. Louis, and up the Missouri on the Clermont No. 2 to the Kanza landing at Westport on 1 November — then fifty miles overland to the Sugar Creek reservation in Kansas, arriving 9 November 1846. At least seven people died on the journey — one older account says six — and at least 23 more within two months of arrival; the older account counts 323 reaching Kansas, against the Tribes section's 327 removed. Fewer than half the tribe was taken at all: the families of Richardville, Godfroy and Meshingomesia held treaty exemptions and stayed, which is why a Miami community remained in Indiana. Witnesses recorded people taking handfuls of earth from their ancestors' graves before boarding. A small second group was removed in 1867, this time to Oklahoma, under the Treaty of 1867.

Sources: Myaamia Project, removal remembrance, aacimotaatiiyankwi.org; Griswold, Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (1917); Indian removals in Indiana summary

The game itself, from the Retrosheet play-by-play rebuilt out of the next day's Cleveland papers: the Kekiongas won the toss and sent Cleveland to bat. Deacon White led off with a double off Bobby Mathews — the first hit in league history — and was doubled off moments later. Fort Wayne scored once in the second and once in the fifth, the second run advancing on passed balls, and Mathews, twenty years old and five-foot-five, finished a 2–0 shutout: the first win, the first complete game and the first shutout in the record books, at a score the site marker notes remained the lowest in the National Association's five-year history. Rain ended it in the ninth. The crowd was only a few hundred — contemporary estimates start at about 200 — kept down by threatening weather, and the game holds its “first” because the Boston–Washington game scheduled the same day was rained out. The grounds were the Kekionga Ball Grounds, west of the St. Marys on the old Camp Allen ground (previous entry). The club folded before the season ended, after eight more home games. A monument was unveiled on the site, now Camp Allen Park, on 4 May 2017.

Sources: Retrosheet, first National Association game play-by-play, retrosheet.org; SABR, Kekionga Ball Grounds (Griggs & Nitz) and “May 4, 1871” (Thorn); Baseball-Reference Bullpen; Kekionga Ball Grounds marker, hmdb.org

The visiting Quincy club was a professional nine trying the Jenney Electric Company's new arc lamps, and the experiment's notices — in the Gazette, the Fort Wayne News and Sporting Life alike — were bad enough that night baseball waited decades to return here in earnest. What was scheduled first, on 29–30 May 1883, and what had already happened at Hull, Massachusetts, in 1880, is the substance of “Fort Wayne hosted the first night baseball game, in 1883.”.

The week, day by day. A Good Friday windstorm (21 March) opened it; then rain from Easter Sunday — 4.75 inches between the morning of 23 March and the night of the 25th, 2.76 inches of it on the 24th alone. The Maumee stood at 6.7 feet on Easter and 19.6 feet the next morning; by 25 March some 2,000 homes were under water. The crest came at 11 p.m. on 26 March, 26.1 feet in the Weather Service series, and that night the dikes guarding Lakeside breached on both the St. Joseph and Maumee sides. Lakeside, Nebraska, Bloomingdale and Spy Run took the worst of it; every pumping station flooded, and the water supply failed with them. Martial law was declared, Mayor Jesse Grice ran the relief, and the Floods marker records the orders given to shoot looters. The relief organisation aided 11,187 people; some 10,000 homeless were fed in halls, churches and the courthouse; a Chicago lifesaving crew worked the city with a 30-person motorised rescue boat; Stephen B. Fleming sent a special relief train to Peru, Indiana, and Fort Wayne filled an order for 38 coffins for Peru's dead. Damage is stated at about $4.8 million in the News-Sentinel reconstruction and at about $3 million in another News-Sentinel account; both figures are carried here because both are in print. The river fell below flood stage on 3 April.

Sources: Jarosh, News-Sentinel flood reconstruction, egen.fortwayne.com; Midwestern Regional Climate Center / Purdue, 1913 Flood community profile, mrcc.purdue.edu; ACGSI, 1913 Flood page; The Floods marker

The fight, as the record keeps it. The rivers began rising on the night of 12 March 1982, on a deep snowpack, a fast thaw and overnight thunderstorms. Evacuations are put at about 9,000 in most accounts, and at 10,000 by 17 March in the chronology of the University of Delaware's case study; both figures stand in print and both are carried here. The damage count: 1,820 residences and 260 businesses damaged — and, on the News-Sentinel's accounting, about 1,860 properties saved outright by the volunteers. The signature stand was the Pemberton dike in Lakeside, where volunteers relayed 287,000 sandbags hand to hand to plug the leaks. Sandbagging headquarters moved to Memorial Coliseum; the schools closed and their students filled bags, the “children's crusade” the national education press covered at the time. The Delaware study counts some 30,000 volunteers, about 18,000 of them students; Mayor Win Moses later put it at 11,000 high school students and more than a million sandbags (“In 1982 the river crested at 26.93 feet, 30,000 volunteers saved the city, and Reagan named it ‘The City That Saved Itself.’” keeps the split). Nebraska Elementary flooded, at a cost above $200,000. President Reagan landed at Baer Field on 16 March and sandbagged at the Sherman Boulevard dike in boots lent by a volunteer, Greg Miller; the federal disaster declaration followed his visit. The crest came on 17 March; its height is the dispute of “In 1982 the river crested at 26.93 feet, 30,000 volunteers saved the city, and Reagan named it ‘The City That Saved Itself.’”.

Sources: News-Sentinel flood retrospective; Phillips, The Fort Wayne Flood: A Case Study, University of Delaware Disaster Research Center WP 73 (1984); Education Week, March 1982; History Center artifact 97.29.2

The date on this entry needs the fuller record, and the fuller record splits it in two. What happened in 1993 was the groundbreaking: on 26 October 1993, at the groundbreaking ceremony, the park was dedicated as the premier “Lasting Legacy” of the Fort Wayne Bicentennial Celebration and a monument to the citizens of the “City That Saved Itself,” in the Bicentennial Commission's words as the Floods marker copies them. Construction of the roughly thirty acres in the Thumb ran from 1994 to 1999 — architect Eric R. Kuhne's flood-control plan, funded by the Headwaters Park Commission's ten million private dollars — and the completed Headwaters Flood Control and Park Project was itself dedicated and opened on 22 October 1999, Fort Wayne's 205th birthday, with Gov. Frank O'Bannon and Mayor Paul Helmke cutting the ribbon. Mayor Win Moses had first called for the park in 1981, a year before the flood that made its case. The Three Rivers Festival moved onto the ground in 1997, as the festival plaza took shape, and the park's concrete flood-retention walls, dedicated in 2001, stand where the sandbaggers of 1982 worked to protect the National Guard Armory.

Sources: Headwaters Park and Floods markers, hmdb.org; Around Fort Wayne, Headwaters Park anniversary account (2009)