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Farms · The ground that fed the city
Fort Wayne began as a trading post in a forest, and for its first century the city's life ran on what the clearings around it could grow. The county that organized around the fort in 1824 became, by the measure of its own censuses, one of the great farm counties of Indiana — nearly all of its 426,880 acres in farms in 1900, its wheat the cash staple of the canal era, its drained swamps reckoned the strongest corn land in the county by the federal surveyors of 1908. The city ate from a public market on land Samuel Hanna gave for the purpose in 1837, judged its animals and grain at fairs its farmers organized in 1841, and built the institutions — a farm bureau, a cooperative with its own elevators and hatchery, a county extension service — that carried the farm economy into the present. What follows is that record, in the dated numbers the censuses give and the dated documents the press, the fair books, and the award lists preserve. The firms that processed what the farms raised — the dairies and packing houses — belong to the Business section; the ground before the first furrow belongs to the Land and Tribes sections. This section holds the farms themselves.
The county in numbers: the census frame
1870 — 2022
The benchmarks, as each count states them: Allen County's farm record can be read off its censuses at four points, and the shape of the whole story is in the spread between them. The official reports quoted in the county history…
Wheat: the cash crop of the canal era, and its fall
1840s — 1908
First a fortune, then a footnote: Corn was the first crop in the new ground — the federal soil survey of 1908, looking back, puts corn first in the partially broken clearings, followed by wheat — but wheat was the crop that paid.…
Corn, oats, and the drained land; then corn and soy
1880s — 2022
The rotation that replaced wheat: What took wheat's place was made possible by the ditch. In the 1880s the county's great swamps were attacked in earnest: the Eel River ditch, completed in 1887, ran 11 miles and drained over…
The muck crops: onions, celery, peppermint — and beets on the clay
1880s — 1940s
Black soil, specialty crops: The county's strangest farmland was its muck — the deep black deposits of decayed vegetation in the old lakebeds and stream channels, worthless until drained and then, in the federal surveyors' words…
Forage, pasture, and the seed harvest
1856 — 2022
The quiet acres: The crops that fed the animals left fewer headlines than the crops that fed the market, but for a century they held much of the county's ground. Hay stood among the staples from the start — 11,055 tons in the…
Barr Street: the public market, 1837 to today
1837 — present
The oldest public space in Fort Wayne: The city's farm market began as a gift with a condition. In 1837 Samuel Hanna — the town's leading pioneer, and, fittingly, a founder of the farmers' Agricultural Society four years later …
The garden ring: truck farms and market gardens
1890s — 1910s
The farms that faced the city: Between the grain townships and the city's dinner tables lay a ring of small, intensive farms — the truck farms and market gardens that grew perishables as close to the buyer as the roads allowed.…
The county fair: from the Agricultural Society to Carroll Road
1841 — present
The farmers organize, then exhibit: The Allen County Fair begins as an argument about who would run it. In the spring of 1841 Fort Wayne's farmers were called to the Court House — Saturday, May 29, Elias Waters in the chair — to…
The notable farms: two centuries on the same ground
1837 — 2026
Measured in generations: Allen County's most distinctive farm honor is not size but tenure. Indiana's Hoosier Homestead Award, created in 1976, recognizes farms held by one family for a century or more — Centennial at 100 years…
The institutions: bureau, co-op, extension, 4-H
1916 — present
The machinery around the farm: Around the individual farms grew the institutions that bought, sold, taught, and organized. The farmers' political arm is the Allen County Farm Bureau, the county unit of Indiana Farm Bureau…
The modern layer: farms inside the city, and the shrinking map
1997 — present
The farm comes back downtown: The newest chapter of the county's farm record runs in two directions at once. Outward, the map keeps thinning: the censuses printed at the head of this section give the dated arithmetic — 65 percent…