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1824 — 1838
Lodging is the town's first licensed business: On August 10, 1824 — months after the townsite was platted — the first tavern licenses in Fort Wayne were granted, to William Suttonfield and to Alexander Ewing, each on payment of $12.50, the Circuit Court having acted on the applications first. The licenses' liquor side is told in the Bars & Nightclubs section; what matters here is that a tavern license in 1824 was a lodging license too. The keeper of a tavern owed the traveler a bed, a meal, and stabling, and for years those two houses at Barr and Columbia were effectively the town's hotel stock.
Suttonfield's stood on the northeast corner of Barr and Columbia, Lot 33 of the original plat. Ewing's, on Lot 63 at the southwest corner of the same streets, was known as the Washington Hall; it continued under Ewing until 1829, when Robert Hood and Abner Gerard succeeded him, and was run in 1837 and 1838 by P. Timmons before it ceased to be used as a hotel. A third early house followed in 1835, when McMacken, having disposed of his interest in the Washington Hall, opened a hotel on the northeast corner of Columbia and Calhoun — the third site, the county history notes, occupied for hotel purposes in Fort Wayne.
Sources:
- History of Allen County, Indiana (Kingman Brothers, 1880), taverns chapter — the August 10, 1824 licenses, the $12.50 fee, the Barr-and-Columbia sites and lot numbers, the Washington Hall succession, and the McMacken house of 1835.
- the Bars & Nightclubs section of this history — the same 1824 licenses carried as the first entry of the city's bar record.