Pork, grain and whiskey by rail: the shipping-point decades

1856 — 1900

The railroad did not end the outward trade; it industrialized it: The Wabash Railroad was completed from Toledo to Lafayette by way of Fort Wayne in June 1856, and passenger traffic on the canal ceased soon after; freight followed the freight cars. What did not change was the direction of the flow or its contents — wheat, corn, pork and whiskey still moved east, but now on schedules, in carloads, and through firms rather than boat lines. Two of the men who organized that trade lie in Lindenwood Cemetery under the city's own biographical record. Solomon Bash (1828–1912) founded S. Bash & Co. in 1870, remembered in the record as the pioneer Fort Wayne grain firm; Bash himself was "a prominent grain dealer in northern Indiana for 62 years," a trade that meant buying the surrounding counties' wheat and corn and shipping it on to eastern millers and exporters. Fred Eckart (1830–1894), a Bavarian butcher who had come to Fort Wayne in 1849, built the same business in pork: after a meat-market start on West Jefferson, he enlarged at the close of the Civil War into the Eckart pork packing plant at 1825 West Main Street, which the record calls one of Fort Wayne's thriving businesses for many years and which left him an estate valued at half a million dollars. The packing trade's outward record — barreled pork and lard in the canal list, carloads after it — belongs in its firm detail to the Business section, as does the distilling trade whose product had filled 5,977 barrels of the 1848 ledger; the Wineries & Distilleries section carries the making of it. What the export record notes is the continuity: for the whole second half of the century, Fort Wayne's outward cargo was still what its ground produced, only better organized.

Sources:

1. The Wabash-Erie Canal (ACPL copy, Internet Archive) — the Wabash Railroad completed Toledo to Lafayette via Fort Wayne in June 1856 and the end of canal passenger traffic.
2. Pioneers Resting in Historic Lindenwood (1989) — the Solomon Bash sketch ("FOUNDER OF BASH GRAIN CO., 1870") and the Fred Eckart sketch, on the post–Civil War Eckart pork packing plant at 1825 West Main Street.
3. Businesses and Wineries & Distilleries — the packing and distilling firms in full, cross-referenced and not retold here.