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THE PRE-FACTORY ECONOMY · 1819 TO ABOUT 1850
Trade and craft: The economy Fort Wayne started with was a trading post with workshops attached. Samuel Hanna built his log store at Barr and Columbia in 1819, trading with the Miami at annuity time; the town's first gristmill — the Barnett & Hanna mill of 1827, later the Fairfield, Beaver, Glenwood and Esmond mill — ground the surrounding farms' grain; and in 1828 Absalom Holcomb and Isaac Marquis opened a tannery at the west end of Columbia Street, soaking hides in basement vats in a solution of urine and oak bark. The same year holds the record's smallest complete picture of the artisan economy: Madore Truckery's cooper shop and Holloway Cushman's blacksmith shop, two one-man or few-man trades preserved as a combined thin-record entry in the Business section. A decade later the diarist Charles Dawson's Fort Wayne still ran on named craftsmen — Paige & Fry's tannery and the firm of Taylor, Freeman & Co. are single mentions in his sketches, firms known by their owners' names because the owner was the firm. The full record of each of these businesses is in the Business section.
Scale and character: The scale was the scale of muscle, water and wood. The census counted 2,080 people in the new city in 1840 and 4,282 in 1850. Production was bespoke or small-batch: a mill ground what farmers brought, a tannery cured what hunters and butchers supplied, a cooper made barrels to order. Skill lived in persons, not in organizations — an apprentice learned a whole trade from a master — and the working day was set by daylight, season and water level rather than by a timetable. The Wabash and Erie Canal, opened through Fort Wayne in 1843, enlarged this economy without changing its character: it made the town a shipping point for a farm hinterland, multiplied its stores, warehouses and taverns, and raised its population, but the goods still moved slowly, froze in winter, and were made much as they had been made a century before. What the canal town did not yet have was a single employer who hired by the hundred. That arrived with the railroad.
Sources: the Business section's entries for the Barnett–Hanna Trading Post, the Barnett & Hanna Mill, the Holcomb & Marquis Tannery, the 1828 trades, and Dawson's 1838 firms (this history); U.S. decennial census population figures as compiled in the Griswold-Phelps handbook (1913–14) and the Ninth Edition Encyclopædia Britannica — the handbook's 4,882 for 1850 is a misprint against the census figure of 4,282 carried elsewhere.