Headwaters Park — 333 South Clinton Street

Headwaters Park occupies the flood-prone ground at the confluence itself, 333 South Clinton Street — the land where the St. Joseph and St. Marys meet to form the Maumee, across from the Old Fort grounds. For most of the twentieth century the site was a tangle of rail lines, industry and flood plain in the middle of the city. After the great flood of 1982 it was reconceived as the city's central park: ground was broken in 1993, private money was raised alongside the public work — some $10 million of it by the Headwaters Park Commission — and the park was dedicated and opened on October 22, 1999, Fort Wayne's 205th birthday. Its festival plaza became the home ground of the city's summer season: the Three Rivers Festival, treated in the vanished-famous entry below, centered its July run there, and its successor festival, Big Fort Fest, is held there now. The flood story that made the park necessary is in the Events and Wars chapters; the park as it stands — lawns, plaza and pavilion on the exact ground the whole city exists to occupy — is the confluence made public. Together with the fort-site marker ring it carries, Headwaters is the place where Fort Wayne explains itself to visitors: three rivers, one junction, and a park where a flood plain used to be.

Sources: Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation and Headwaters Park Alliance records; the Events chapter of this history (park dedicated and opened October 22, 1999, on Fort Wayne's 205th birthday; groundbreaking 1993); Fort Wayne Today chapter for the festival succession.