The Botanical Conservatory: winter, abolished for an afternoon

1983-

The two friends: The Foellinger-Freimann Botanical Conservatory began, in the city's own telling, as an idea between two friends who wanted Fort Wayne to have an indoor sanctuary: Helene Foellinger, publisher of the News-Sentinel, and Bill Sowers, a local attorney and trustee, who visited gardens around the world together and wanted to share the same beauty at home. They secured the backing to build it: the City of Fort Wayne, the Foellinger Foundation, the Freimann Trust and Lincoln National Corporation, on a foundation laid in a multi-party agreement in 1979. The Conservatory opened in November 1983 at 1100 South Calhoun Street, owned and operated by the Parks Department, and the first plant installed in the gardens was a beefsteak begonia, a houseplant for a city's house.

The family draw: What the Conservatory gave Fort Wayne families was a new season. In January, a child could walk out of an Indiana winter into a tropical house with a waterfall, then into a Sonoran Desert of cactus, then out to the showcase garden where the Parks Department rebuilt the room several times a year, four changing showcases in the current account. The numbers mark its place: 25,000 square feet of indoor gardens, over 1,200 plants of more than 500 species, thousands of schoolchildren a year in the department's account, and, in February 2024, the three millionth visitor, in the house's 41st year. Alongside Science Central a dozen years later, the Conservatory made downtown Fort Wayne a place a family could deliberately take a child, in any weather, all year: the city's answer, built by two friends and two trusts, to the question of what to do with children in February.

Sources:

1. City of Fort Wayne, Botanical Conservatory About page (the Foellinger and Sowers origin, the backing, the 1983 opening, the beefsteak begonia, the three millionth visitor in February 2024, the 40th anniversary in 2023).
2. Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation news release, May 2016, carried by AroundFortWayne (the November 1983 opening; the Foellinger Foundation and Freimann Charitable Trust funding; Parks operation).
3. U-S-History, Foellinger-Freimann Botanical Conservatory (the 1979 multi-party agreement).