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 of the county's land in farm uses in 1997, 281,635 acres in farms in 2017, and the 2022 count of 329,722 acres stated on its own terms — while the farms themselves consolidated from the 90-acre average of 1900 to 220 acres in 2022. Inward, farming re-entered the city as policy. In 2015 the City of Fort Wayne's Office of Housing & Neighborhood Services completed the renovation of former Fire Station No. 9 at 2518 Winter Street — about $500,000 in community development funds, by the local account — and, with Purdue Extension–Allen County and neighborhood partners, began farming the vacant lots behind it: three-quarters of an acre of gardens and a hoop house, a commercial teaching kitchen in the old engine house, and a Friday farm stand selling what the ground grows to the Renaissance Pointe neighborhood around it. The farm is named Johnnie Mae Farm, for Johnnie Mae White, the longtime neighborhood advocate who had preached healthy eating on the southeast side until her death in 2001; the building won a 2016 Archie award, and a decade on the city and Purdue Extension still run it together, produce and nutrition education side by side. It is a small acreage against the county's third of a million farm acres — and, in the long record, a familiar one: a piece of city ground, given over to feeding its neighbors, three-quarters of a mile and 178 years from the market Samuel Hanna endowed for the same purpose.

Sources:

1. City of Fort Wayne, "Johnnie Mae Farm" and Office of Housing & Neighborhood Services releases (2015–2025) — the 2015 renovation of former fire station No. 9 at 2518 Winter Street, the partnership with Purdue Extension–Allen County, the farming of the lots behind the station, and the naming for Johnnie Mae White.
2. Waynedale News, "Serving Food Desert Residents With Fresh Produce" (July 5, 2019) — the farm stand at 2518 Winter Street, the 0.75-acre property, about $500,000 in community development funds, and Johnnie Mae White's advocacy and 2001 death.
3. Around Fort Wayne, city release (July 19, 2018) — the farm stand's Friday hours, the 2016 Archie award, and the operating partnership (Office of Housing & Neighborhood Services, Purdue Extension–Allen County, Vincent Village, Community Harvest Food Bank, the Renaissance Pointe YMCA, and the neighborhood association).
4. USDA, NASS, Census of Agriculture county profiles for Allen County (2017 and 2022), and the Indiana farmland study figure for 1997 — the dated farmland figures, as stated in the frame entry of this section.