The canal-era houses: American, Rockhill, Hedekin

1836 — 1969

The canal fills the houses: When the Wabash and Erie Canal was completed to Fort Wayne in 1843, the town's lodging moved up a class. The American House — John Spencer erected the building in 1836 on the northeast corner of the public square, kept first by Amos Compton and then by E. Palmer — was enough of a civic room that the citizens held their meeting for a daily mail line there on September 2, 1843. Samuel Lillie's tavern stood on Columbia Street, three doors east of Calhoun. Frank Rohle's Palo Alto was built in 1839 and opened as a tavern in 1840.

Two houses of the canal years approached something modern. The Rockhill House, begun in 1838 and finished in 1843 by William Rockhill at Broadway and Main — ground later taken into St. Joseph Hospital — was one. The other was the Hedekin House. Michael Hedekin, a native of County Westmeath, Ireland, who had located in Fort Wayne in 1834, built it in 1843–44 on the east side of Barr Street between Columbia and Main, within a stone's throw of the canal docks, on ground that had been part of the old fort site. The tavern opened in 1846 with Calvin Anderson as landlord. In 1851 two stage lines kept their offices in the Hedekin — Doyle & Hoskinson's tri-weekly four-horse coaches to St. Marys, Ohio, connecting with the packets to Dayton and Cincinnati, and Sperry & Stewart's line to Wolf Lake and Elkhart. Winifred Randall's reminiscence collection puts it plainly: the Hedekin and the Rockhill "were the first hotels in Fort Wayne to approach modern standards," and the Hedekin "proved to be the place of entertainment for many of the great of ante-bellum days."

The Hedekin outlasted its era by a century. Its upper floors were still let as a hotel — later under the name Home Hotel — while the ground floor went to retail, and it stood, in the Historical Society's phrase, "as a reminder of the days of the stage coach and the canal packet," until it was demolished in 1968–69 after 124 years, in the Columbia Street clearances told in the Heritage section.

Sources:

1. History of Allen County, Indiana (1880) — the Spencer/American House building of 1836 and its keepers, the September 2, 1843 mail meeting, the Lillie tavern, and the Hedekin stage-line offices of 1851.
2. B. J. Griswold and Mrs. Samuel R. Taylor, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana (1917) — the Hedekin House: built 1843–44, opened 1846 under Calvin Anderson, and its lessees.
3. Winifred J. Randall, As I Remember (Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society; Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County, 1960) — "Early Taverns," the Rockhill and Palo Alto dates, and the "first hotels to approach modern standards" judgment.
4. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI), Named Places: Hedekin House — the 1843–44 building, the site by the canal docks, and demolition in 1968–69 after 124 years (Bates & Keller, The Columbia Street Story, 1975).
5. Indiana Memory / History Center digital collections — 1968 photograph caption noting the Hedekin's later name, Home Hotel.