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| Year | First |
|---|---|
| 1824 | Allen Hamilton — first sheriff of Allen County, appointed by the governor. |
| 1840 | George W. Wood — first mayor; Franklin P. Randall — first recorder (and charter author); William Rockhill and five others — first common council. |
| 1867 | Henry Sharp — first Republican mayor. |
| 1921 | Catherine Dinklage — first woman elected to Fort Wayne City Council (8 November 1921); the Journal Gazette's front page and Peggy Seigel's study in the Indiana Magazine of History identify her as the first woman elected to any office in Indiana. |
| 1985 | Cosette Simon — first woman to serve as mayor of Fort Wayne (acting, eleven days). |
| 2014 | Sharon Tucker — first Black woman elected to the Allen County Council (District 1); at her seating she was that council's only woman, only African American and only Democrat. |
| 2015 | Michelle Chambers — first African American city clerk of Fort Wayne. |
| 2016 | Lana Keesling — first Republican city clerk since 1971. |
| 2020 | Sharon Tucker (District 6) and Michelle Chambers (at-large) — the first two African American women to serve on Fort Wayne City Council; Chambers the first Black woman elected to an at-large seat. |
| 2024 | Sharon Tucker — first Black mayor of Fort Wayne, first Black woman to hold the office, and the second woman to serve as mayor. |
One first remains unestablished in the sources used for this expansion: the identity of the first African American man elected to the City Council. The reference most likely to settle it — Dodie Marie Miller's African Americans in Fort Wayne: The First 200 Years (2000) — is named in the notes so the item is closed from evidence, not from memory.