The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
THE ENABLING CHANGES · 1832 TO 1858
The canal first: Ground was broken for the Wabash and Erie Canal on 22 February 1832, and the opening was celebrated at Fort Wayne on 4 July 1843. A canal boat carried a passenger from Fort Wayne to Toledo for $3.25, and the town's population reached about 2,000 by 1840 on the strength of the trade. The canal's deeper gift to the coming factory age was organizational: it taught the town's merchants — Samuel Hanna above all — to raise capital by subscription, to lobby a legislature, and to build infrastructure larger than any single firm.
The wire: In 1848 the first telegraph line reached Fort Wayne along the canal, connecting the town with Toledo. Orders, prices and credit could now move at the speed of electricity while goods still moved at the speed of a horse — the first separation of information from transport, and a precondition of managing factories that sold to a continent.
The railroad: When it became clear in the early 1850s that the canal could not carry what the town would need, Hanna led the subscription drive for the Ohio and Indiana Railroad and, with Pliny Hoagland and William Mitchell, took the construction contract for the 131 miles from Crestline, Ohio — a contract the Fort Wayne News later put at $740,000. The line's first locomotive arrived in the most symbolic way the record offers: it came to Fort Wayne in pieces on a canal barge in 1854, was unloaded at the canal landing at the foot of Lafayette Street, assembled in Francis Comparet's warehouse, and set to work building the road that would kill the canal. The rail line was completed to the south side of town in 1854 — trains from Philadelphia ran into Fort Wayne that November, by the Valley of the Upper Maumee account — and the Wabash road's first train followed in late November 1855. In August 1856 the connecting lines united as the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad, and by 1858 the through line to Chicago was complete. A 1907 Fort Wayne News history dates the Ohio & Indiana's entry to the fall of 1855 instead; the 1854 completion is the better-supported dating, and both are carried here because the sources give both. The prophecy made at the first train's arrival came true, the same account says, within twenty years: the railroad cut the canal's business away until the canal was put out of business. Steam power arrived with the rails — coal could now be hauled in bulk to any trackside lot — and the factory map of Fort Wayne was drawn, for the next century, along its rail lines.
Sources: History Center, "Samuel Hanna: The Founder of Fort Wayne" (canal groundbreaking and opening, the railroad subscription and the 1854 completion); Visit Fort Wayne, "A Look at Fort Wayne, Indiana's History" (the $3.25 canal fare, the 1848 telegraph line, the locomotive by canal in 1854); ACGSI, "First Things in Fort Wayne," printing the Fort Wayne News of 19 February 1907 (the $740,000 contract, the 1855 variant dating, the canal's eclipse within twenty years) and ACGSI's Railroad History of Fort Wayne (the locomotive unloaded at the landing in 1854, the line complete to Chicago by 1856–58); Valley of the Upper Maumee River, Vol. II (1889) (trains from Philadelphia in November 1854).