The fires that marked the city

1882–1974 · SINGLE BUILDINGS, NOT A CONFLAGRATION

The pattern: Fort Wayne never had its Chicago fire. The wooden town of the fire limits burned building by building, and its fire memory is a ledger of single addresses. On the evening of 16 December 1882 the First Presbyterian church, at Clinton and Berry streets on the site of the present federal building, was destroyed by fire at a loss of $14,500. February 1894 took two: the original Clay school building, destroyed by an incendiary fire, and the Bell Telephone exchange in the Foellinger building, whose destruction sent the exchange into temporary quarters at Main and Calhoun. On 27 October 1904 fire destroyed the ell-shaped building wrapping the Randall Hotel on Harrison Street — the Journal-Gazette's headlines put the loss first at $20,000, then $30,000, the hotel itself threatened — and the rebuilding that followed produced the Randall Building of 1905.

The Aveline, 3 May 1908: The city's worst fire, and in the words of the wire reports "the catastrophe the worst in the history [of] Fort Wayne," came at the New Aveline Hotel, the six-story brick house at the southeast corner of Calhoun and Berry, built 1860–63 by Francis Aveline and for forty-five years the city's leading hotel. At about 3:30 on the Sunday morning of 3 May 1908, with some seventy guests asleep, fire was discovered in the elevator shaft by the night clerk, Ralph Piplins; the contemporary dispatches traced it to an electric fuse blown out under the stairs beside the shaft, the flash igniting oil in the machinery, so that within minutes the whole interior was a mass of flames and the shaft a chimney. The hotel register burned with the building, and there was never an exact count of the missing: the next day's reports named eleven known dead, most of them traveling salesmen, with more unaccounted for; Chief of Police Ankenbruck believed as many as twenty bodies might still be in the ruins, and Fire Chief Hilbrecht directed the department's work while two companies of militia aided the fire and police forces in clearing the debris. Griswold, retelling the fire in his "Stories of Old Fort Wayne" in the Journal-Gazette of 10 July 1921, gave the settled figure the city's histories have kept — twelve men and women; Kevin Leininger's News-Sentinel retrospective of 1981 put the toll at eleven, "the worst fire the city ever had" in loss of life. The two figures stand in the record side by side, and they are printed so here. The hotel and its furnishings were valued at $80,000. The Shoaff Building rose on the site.

The Sears fire, 27 March 1944: The downtown fire of the next generation burned on the evening of 27 March 1944 at the Sears, Roebuck store in the 100 block of West Berry Street. The Quest Club's paper "Fires That Have Ravaged Fort Wayne" (Lynn Koehlinger, 1979) records that the fire started on the fifth floor, that within half an hour of the 8:45 closing time flames were licking over the roof, fed by drafts from the elevator shafts and stairways, and that the fire's disaster had a second act: during the renovation of the building, walls toppled into the adjoining Fort Wayne National Bank building, killing at least one person. Sears rebuilt on South Clinton Street.

The Keenan fires: The last fires in the ledger belong to the 13-story Hotel Keenan at Washington and Harrison: fires in 1969 and 1974 injured guests and staff — no lives were lost — and, in the Journal Gazette's retrospective phrase, "pointed out the safety limitations of the decades old high-rise hotel." The Keenan was closed in May 1974 and demolished that October; the Grand Wayne Center stands on its ground.

Sources:

1. Griswold, Pictorial History (1917), Ch. XLIII (the First Presbyterian fire, 1882; the Bell exchange fire, February 1894) and the Clay school caption in Ch. XXXV; B. J. Griswold, "Stories of Old Fort Wayne — No. 12: Aveline Hotel," Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, 10 July 1921 (the twelve victims), as reproduced on ACGSI's Aveline Hotel page.
2. Contemporary wire reports of the Aveline fire, 4–14 May 1908 — the Dubuque Times Journal, 4 May 1908 (eleven known dead, the fuse and the shaft, the militia in the ruins), and the Barnwell People, 14 May 1908, via Chronicling America (Piplins's discovery, the $80,000 value).
3. Kevin Leininger, "Death of the Aveline House," News-Sentinel Cityscapes, 17 October 1981 — the toll given as eleven.
4. National Park Service, National Register nomination for the Randall Building (listed 7 December 1990) — the fire of 27 October 1904 and the Journal-Gazette headlines of 28 October 1904.
5. Lynn Koehlinger, "Fires That Have Ravaged Fort Wayne," Quest Club paper, 1979 (Allen County Public Library, Quest Club Papers), as quoted on ACGSI's Sears page — the fire of 27 March 1944 and the wall collapse.
6. Corey McMaken, "1974: Explosive demolitions of Van Orman, Keenan hotels," Journal Gazette, 25 July 2019, as reproduced on ACGSI's Hotel Keenan page — the fires of 1969 and 1974.