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 federal survey of 1908 maps the ring by its soils: with Fort Wayne grown into "a large manufacturing city," it records, "more attention has been given to these special crops. The city furnishes a splendid market for such products, all of which do well on the sandy soils just east and west of town," potatoes thriving on the lighter soils and the lighter phases of the muck; drained muck itself brought about $80 an acre, and "the corn and truck soils command the highest price" of any land in the county. The record is equally plain about the ring's limits: even in 1908 "the supply of vegetables and fruit is even yet inadequate, and many carloads are shipped in annually" — the garden ring fed the city first but never fed it fully. The hands in the ring were disproportionately German. The market's own master Peter Kiser stands in the market tradition as one of Fort Wayne's first Germans, and the county histories' farm sketches fill the near townships — Washington, Milan, Lake — with the German farm families who worked the city's edge: the Württemberg-born Kurtzes, who came to Milan Township in 1871; John C. Pfeiffer, "one of the leading and most wealthy farmers of Allen county," on 240 acres; the Giesekings and Kammeyers of Washington Township on their hundred-to-hundred-and-sixty-acre farms. Their produce moved the short road into Barr Street and the city's groceries, and the survey's apple-and-peach judgment — orchards on the Dunkirk sandy loam, "given proper care," would "doubtless prove remunerative" — marks the ring's fruit frontier as it stood in 1908. The orchard name the whole world attaches to this ground belongs to an earlier generation and another section: Johnny Appleseed's nurseries and the folklore that grew from them are told in the Folklore record, and the farms of that story begin here, in a county learning to grow for a market.

Sources:

1. U.S. Bureau of Soils, Soil Survey of Allen County, Indiana (1908; issued 1910) — the manufacturing city's demand for fruit and vegetables, the sandy soils "just east and west of town," potatoes on the lighter soils and muck phases, drained muck at about $80 an acre, corn and truck soils commanding the highest prices, the shipped-in carloads, and the apple-and-peach prospect on the Dunkirk sandy loam.
2. The History Center, "Barr Street Market: Trading Under the Trees" — Peter Kiser's market mastership and the tradition of his German first-settler standing.
3. Griswold & Taylor, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana (1917), vol. II, biographical sketches, and Valley of the Upper Maumee River (1889), township annals — the German farm families of the near townships as named in the entry (Kurtz of Milan Township; Pfeiffer; Gieseking and Kammeyer of Washington Township), sketches cross-referenced, not retold.