The motor age: tourist cabins, the Lincoln Highway, and the bypass

1913 — 1960s

The guest arrives by car: The automobile reached Fort Wayne's lodging trade down the Lincoln Highway, which crossed Allen County for 33.5 miles on its 1913 route, later US 30. The Indiana Lincoln Highway Association's turn-by-turn guide to that route still records the lodging layer it created: on the approach from Ohio, "an old cabin on your left that we understand was part of a group of tourist cabins on these grounds in the early days of auto travel," and just inside Fort Wayne on New Haven Avenue, "an old tourist-style motel on your left, now repurposed, with a Bates Motel sign in the window" — the guide's own words, and the sum of what the byway record preserves of the city's cabin-court era. In 1950 Fort Wayne opened its first bypass, Coliseum Boulevard, on the north side, and in 1952 the War Memorial Coliseum opened beside it; lodging followed the traffic to the corridor, a migration the Coliseum cluster of 2008 (below) completed. The named-court record — the individual motels of Goshen Road, Lima Road, and the Coliseum strip, court by court — rests in the city directories and the postcard trade, and was not pulled; the gap is named in this section's note rather than filled from memory. One national fact frames the local one: the chain era that replaced the courts began with Kemmons Wilson's first Holiday Inn at Memphis in August 1952 — but no source reached dates the first Holiday Inn in Fort Wayne, and no date is printed for it.

Sources:

1. Indiana Lincoln Highway Association, Indiana's Lincoln Highway Byway: A Turn-by-Turn Road Guide (1913 Route, 2024) — the 33.5 Allen County miles, the tourist-cabin group on the eastern approach, and the repurposed tourist motel on New Haven Avenue.
2. "Fort Wayne, Indiana" (city history summary, Wikipedia) — Coliseum Boulevard, the city's first bypass, opened 1950; the Coliseum followed in 1952.
3. IHG / Holiday Inn brand history summaries — the first Holiday Inn, Memphis, August 1952, as the chain era's starting point.