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Fort Wayne exists because of one piece of geography. The St. Marys River, flowing northeast out of Ohio, and the St. Joseph River, flowing southwest out of Michigan, meet in the middle of the city and form the Maumee, which runs on to Lake Erie. A short distance west, the St. Marys passes within a few miles of Little River, a tributary of the Wabash, which flows to the Ohio and the Mississippi. That gap — the carrying place, or portage — joined the Great Lakes watershed to the Mississippi watershed by one of the shortest overland carries in the interior of the continent, and it made the confluence a crossroads for as long as people have moved goods through this country. The land story and the portage's full record are in the chapters Before Fort Wayne and The Land; this is the place as a famous address.
The confluence was valuable enough to be written into treaty law. The Treaty of Greenville in 1795 reserved to the United States, among its ceded parcels, "one piece six miles square, at or near the confluence of the rivers St. Mary's and St. Joseph's, where Fort Wayne now stands" — 23,040 acres staked on the meeting of the waters. The city that grew up on the reserve still organizes itself around the three rivers: the downtown bridges, the riverfront parks and the trails all take their bearings from the junction, and Headwaters Park, treated below, stands on the ground where the St. Joseph and St. Marys join.
Today the confluence is parkland. From Headwaters Park and the Old Fort grounds on the east bank to Promenade Park on the St. Marys below the junction, the meeting of the rivers is the most visited piece of ground in the city — the site of its largest festivals and the anchor of the riverfront development of the last decade. No single monument marks the exact point where the two rivers become the Maumee; the parks on both banks are the marker.
Sources: Treaty of Greenville, 1795, Article 3 (six miles square at the confluence); Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation and Riverfront Fort Wayne (cityoffortwayne.in.gov; riverfrontfw.org); the portage and land records in this history's Before Fort Wayne and The Land chapters.