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On the east bank of the St. Marys River at 1201 Spy Run Avenue, under a quarter of a mile from where the original stood, rises a full-scale wooden reconstruction of the 1815–16 Fort Wayne — the third and last of the American forts. The replica was built from Major John Whistler's own architectural drawings of the fort he built, by Lok-N-Logs of Sherburne, New York, and it opened shortly before July 4, 1976, as Fort Wayne's centerpiece contribution to the national Bicentennial. Palisade walls, blockhouses, officers' quarters and barracks reproduce the post as Whistler designed it.
The replica is a place, and its fame is the place's: it is the one spot where a visitor can stand inside the fort that gave the city its name, on ground close enough to the original site to see the rivers and Spy Run Creek disposed as the garrison saw them. It hosts reenactments, musters and school programs through the year. The organization that operates it, Historic Fort Wayne Inc. — first organized in 1964 and re-established in its present form in 2004 — runs the site as a museum and living-history venue; that operation, and the institution's history, belong to the Museums chapter. The fort's site story is what is recorded here: an exact-where-it-matters reconstruction, fifty years old in 2026, of a fort that stood from 1816 to the years after its 1819 decommissioning.
Sources: Historic Fort Wayne Inc. (historicfortwayne.com) site history and visiting information; Indiana Historical Bureau marker records for the 1815–16 fort site; Bicentennial-era construction accounts (Lok-N-Logs, Sherburne, New York).