Catholic Cemetery — 3500 Lake Avenue

The Catholic Cemetery, at 3500 Lake Avenue on the city's east side, is Fort Wayne's second famous burying ground and the resting place of its Catholic generations. Bishop Joseph Dwenger bought 120 acres in 1872 along what was then Maysville Road — now Lake Avenue, then a mile outside the city — and the cemetery opened for interments in 1873, its first regular burial coming that November. Burials were moved into it from the older Catholic grounds at Cathedral Square and on Swinney Avenue, and among the monuments re-erected there was Chief Richardville's, moved in 1873; Griswold's Pictorial History records that the chief's body itself remained in the original Cathedral Square grave — a distinction the record keeps, and which the People chapter treats. The Catholic Cemetery Association was organized in April 1893 to govern the ground, which has grown to about 175 acres; the cemetery marked its 150th anniversary in 2023. Where Lindenwood holds the city's Protestant founding generations, Catholic Cemetery holds the Irish, German and later immigrant parishes' dead — between the two grounds, divided by the city's religious geography, lies most of nineteenth-century Fort Wayne.

Sources: Catholic Cemetery Association and Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend cemetery histories (Dwenger purchase 1872; interments from 1873; association organized April 1893; 150th anniversary 2023); Griswold, Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, on the Richardville monument's removal in 1873.