Anthony Wayne: the namesake, who never lived here

1794

The claim, stated plainly: Fort Wayne is named for a man who spent a matter of weeks at the three rivers and never returned. Anthony Wayne (1745-1796), the Revolutionary War general the newspapers called Mad Anthony for his daring at Stony Point, is this section's first entry not because he was born, raised or formed here, but because the city itself is his monument, and a fame roll that skipped the name on the map would be pretending the question away. His entry prints the limit with the honour: he belongs to this page the way a name belongs to a building, completely, and not one day longer than the record allows.

What he did here: After the United States Army's two defeats at the hands of the Miami Confederacy, President Washington gave Wayne the Legion of the United States, and on 20 August 1794 Wayne won the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near the Maumee Rapids in Ohio, the victory that broke the Confederacy's war. He then marched his army up the Maumee to Kekionga, the great Miami town at the head of the river, arriving on 17 September 1794. Wayne personally selected the site for a new American fort, on the high ground overlooking the place where the St. Joseph and St. Marys join to form the Maumee. His soldiers built it to stand against artillery: a bastioned earthwork with blockhouses and a palisade, finished in October and proof, on the engineers' reckoning, against 24-pound cannon fire.

The naming: On 22 October 1794 the fort was formally dedicated and named Fort Wayne, in the general's honour, and placed under the command of Major Jean François Hamtramck. The date is the one the modern city keeps as its founding. The marker record adds the detail that keeps this entry honest: Wayne left four days after the dedication, handing the place to Hamtramck, and never came back. He negotiated the Treaty of Greenville the following summer, and he died in December 1796, on the shore of Lake Erie, a national figure whose name stayed behind him at the three rivers, on a fort, then a town, then a city of a quarter million people who say his surname every time they say where they are from.

Sources:

1. Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, Preserve America community profile: Fort Wayne, Indiana (the 1794 fort, built and named for Revolutionary War General "Mad" Anthony Wayne).
2. Legends of America, Historic Old Fort Wayne (the Legion's arrival 17 September 1794; Wayne's selection of the site; the dedication and Hamtramck's command).
3. Historical Marker Database, Major General Anthony Wayne marker, Fort Wayne (the dedication of 22 October 1794; Wayne's departure four days later, never to return).