The modern ledger: what the federal count says

2012 — 2024

The 1848 station list, kept now in dollars: Since 2005 the International Trade Administration's Metropolitan Export Series has counted goods exports for every American metropolitan statistical area, Fort Wayne's included, by the Census Bureau's origin-of-movement method — goods credited to the metro from which their export journey begins. The metro so measured is the three-county Fort Wayne MSA of Allen, Wells and Whitley counties, and the series' published waypoints give the modern outward trade its scale. In 2012 the Fort Wayne metropolitan area exported $1.4 billion in merchandise, as the Commerce Department's Indiana figures of the period record. In 2015 it exported $1.5 billion in goods — 4.7 percent of all Indiana exports that year, per the International Trade Administration's Indiana report of October 2016. In 2024, the latest year the U.S. Trade Representative's Indiana page reports, Fort Wayne recorded $1.8 billion in goods exports, placing it among the state's top ten metro exporters, behind Indianapolis, Evansville, Lafayette, Elkhart-Goshen, Bloomington and Columbus among Indiana-only metros and far behind the interstate metros that reach into Indiana. Set beside the 1848 ledger the comparison is the history in one line: the canal station moved 157,831 tons of produce and store goods through a town of ten thousand; the modern metro, built by the same outward habit, moves a billion and four-fifths of goods a year into the world's markets, and the counting, like the cargo, has never stopped.

Sources:

1. U.S. Department of Commerce / International Trade Administration data as presented in the Indiana trade figures of 2012 — the Fort Wayne metropolitan area's $1.4 billion in merchandise exports, 2012.
2. International Trade Administration, "Indiana Exports, Jobs, & Foreign Investment" (updated Oct 2016) — Fort Wayne's 2015 goods exports of $1.5 billion, 4.7 percent of the state total.
3. Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Indiana state page — Fort Wayne's $1.8 billion in goods exports in 2024, "latest data available," among the Indiana metro areas listed.
4. International Trade Administration, Metropolitan Export Series — the 2005–2024 annual series and the origin-of-movement (OM-ZIP) methodology by which metro exports are estimated.