The ledger of 1848: one year at the Fort Wayne station

1848

The oldest complete export ledger the city has: The canal history preserves, in full, the list of articles and amounts of produce handled at the Fort Wayne station during the year 1848, and it is the single best document of what this country sent out in the canal age. Outward-bound farm produce leads it by weight and by value: 957,395 bushels of wheat and 1,005,640 bushels of corn; 78,856 barrels of flour; 28,677 barrels of pork, 3,332,101 pounds of lard and 2,293,471 pounds of bacon; 174,852 pounds of butter and 134,031 pounds of cheese; 88,074 pounds of wool, 45,999 pounds of hides, 247,304 pounds of leather, and 46,443 pounds of beeswax. The forest still shipped beside the farm — 3,323,015 feet of lumber, 1,054,468 pounds of staves, hoops and poles, and 7,975 cords of wood — and the marshes shipped too: 534,055 pounds of cranberries, a crop a modern reader does not expect to find at the head of the Maumee. Fort Wayne's own making appears in 5,977 barrels of whiskey and 832 kegs of beer. Against the outward flow the same ledger records the inward one — 75,878 barrels of salt coming in for the packing houses, 1,575,642 pounds of coffee, 1,387,892 pounds of sugar and molasses, 3,446,072 pounds of iron nails — so that the station list reads both ways, produce out and store goods in. The canal's own bookkeeping closes the account: boats ran 463,575 miles through the station that year, passengers 1,357,364 miles, and the total tonnage handled was 157,831 tons, moved through a town whose 1850 population the canal history gives as about ten thousand.

Sources:

1. The Wabash-Erie Canal (ACPL copy, Internet Archive) — "A list of articles and amounts of produce that were handled at the Fort Wayne station during the year 1848," given in full, with the year's boat miles, passenger miles and total tonnage of 157,831.