The quiet anniversaries: 1940, 1944, 1966, 1976

1940 — 1976

Sesquicentennials, observed and not: The 150-year marks came in wartime's shadow, and the record shows the difference. In 1940 the sesquicentennial that Fort Wayne did observe was scholarly: a Harmar Sesquicentennial Symposium, held at Fort Wayne in memory of the 150th anniversary of General Joseph Harmar's 1790 expedition against the Miami, with three speakers on the expedition's phases; Louis A. Warren's program account was published in the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly in 1941. The fort's own 150th anniversary, October 22, 1944, has no such record: no citywide observance of it appears in the sources reached for this section, and the Allen County timeline's Fort Wayne headline for that October is a different visitor — President Franklin D. Roosevelt's campaign speech at Penn Station on October 28, 1944, six days after the anniversary passed. The negative is printed as a gap in the record, stated plainly: if Fort Wayne marked its sesquicentennial in 1944, the marking has not surfaced.

The later anniversaries left institutions instead of pageants. Indiana's sesquicentennial year, 1966, was the occasion the city's first local historic districts were designated in time to celebrate, as the city's preservation history puts it. And the United States Bicentennial of 1976 produced the most durable heritage artifact of the century here: the bicentennial committee whose preparations for the celebration became, in July 1975, ARCH — and, in the same years, the Historical Society's reconstructed Old Fort, treated in the Museums section. The year's smaller artifact survives on South Clinton Street: a marker to Little Turtle, Me-She-Kin-No-Quah, raised, its inscription says, "In Commemoration of our nation's Bicentennial."

Sources:

1. Louis A. Warren, "A Harmar Sesquicentennial Symposium," Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 50, no. 1 (January–March 1941), pp. 47–48 — the 1940 symposium and its program.
2. Allen County Genealogical Society, 1940–1949 Timeline of Allen County — the October 28, 1944 Roosevelt visit; no 1944 anniversary observance appears.
3. City of Fort Wayne, "Mid-Century Modern in Fort Wayne" (2025) — the first districts designated in time for Indiana's 1966 sesquicentennial.
4. ARCH Inc., "Becoming ARCH" (archfw.org) — the 1976 bicentennial committee as ARCH's parent; Historical Marker Database — the Little Turtle bicentennial marker.