The Aveline House: the city's leading hotel for forty-five years

1860 — 1908

A contractor builds the grand house: Francis Aveline was born in Vincennes in 1814 and came to Fort Wayne in 1820 as a child; he became one of the city's most important contractor-builders. After three years of effort to secure financial backing, he built his hotel in 1860–62, with D. J. Silver as builder and contractor, at Calhoun and Berry across from the courthouse — the southeast corner, as the Pictorial History and the News-Sentinel both put it (Griswold's 1921 newspaper retelling says the southwest corner, and the difference stands in the record). It was finished in January 1863: originally four stories of brick, the largest hotel in this region, with two floors added later, its main entrance on Berry Street and a ladies' entrance on Calhoun.

For forty-five years the Aveline was, in Griswold's phrase and in every later account, Fort Wayne's leading hotel, and it "entertained some of America's most noted people during the near half-century of its existence." Its end is the Fire & Safety section's story, and is cross-referenced rather than retold: at about 3:30 on the Sunday morning of May 3, 1908, with some seventy guests asleep, fire took the elevator shaft and then the whole interior. The dead were mostly traveling salesmen. The toll is carried in this record as the Fire section settles it — eleven in the next day's reports and in Leininger's 1981 retrospective, twelve in Griswold's 1921 retelling and the History Center's count — and the two figures stand side by side. The Shoaff Building, later the Gettle Building, rose on the site.

Sources:

1. B. J. Griswold, "Stories of Old Fort Wayne, No. 12: Aveline Hotel," Journal-Gazette, July 10, 1921, via ACGSI — construction 1860–62, completion January 1863, D. J. Silver, the four-story original, and the forty-five years as leading hotel.
2. Kevin Leininger, "Death of the Aveline House," Cityscapes, News-Sentinel, October 17, 1981 — the southeast corner, the added floors, and the toll of eleven.
3. the Fire & Public Safety section of this history — the fire of May 3, 1908 in full, with the eleven-versus-twelve treatment this entry follows.