What Fort Wayne Sold to the World: A History of Its Exports

Exports · What Fort Wayne sold to the world

Fort Wayne was an outward-looking town before it was much of a town at all. The portage between the Maumee and the Wabash made the place a transfer point for furs in the French and British years, and the same geography — the head of one river system, the foot of another — made it a shipping point the moment the canal arrived: first the wheat, pork, lard and whiskey of the surrounding farms moving east to Toledo and the seaboard, then, as the factories came, pumps, wire, trucks and electronics moving out by rail to every continent. The record of that outward trade is unusually concrete at both ends of the story. In 1848 the canal office at Fort Wayne kept a full ledger of what passed through its station, down to the last keg of beer; in our own time the federal government's metropolitan export series counts the same flow in dollars, metro by metro, year by year. Between the ledger and the series stands the machinery the city built for the trade: a customs station in 1988, a foreign-trade zone in 1991, a city office of international trade, and a set of hometown firms — a pump maker whose name became a common noun overseas, a wire-die maker whose customers are on every continent, a paintball company shipping to more than eighty countries — for whom the world was never an afterthought market but the point.