Georgetown Square: the neighborhood center that outlasted the malls

GROUNDBREAKING 1967–1968 · 6300 EAST STATE BOULEVARD · THE NORTHEAST SIDE

A cornfield, staked out: Georgetown Square's fiftieth-anniversary history, published by KPC News on May 30, 2018, preserves the developer's own memory of the ground: "In 1968, Maplecrest Road was a dirt road that ended at two-lane East State Boulevard and the land where Georgetown sits was a cornfield." A Journal Gazette photograph of the first phase's groundbreaking — for a Lincoln National Bank & Trust branch and the ninth Rogers Market — is dated November 2, 1967, a season ahead of the center's own dating of its first groundbreaking to 1968; the record carries both, the photograph and the anniversary. Tom Jehl built the first section — the bank, the Rogers Market, and fourteen stores — pioneering retail in a northeast quadrant that then held, in his words, very few homes east of Reed Road. His brothers Leo and Paul joined the enterprise as it grew, and by 1977 the center passed 250,000 square feet.

Georgetown's distinction is duration. It was built to the scale of a neighborhood — grocery-anchored, locally owned, extended in phases as the subdivisions filled in behind it — and it never chased the regional draw that enriched and then stranded the enclosed malls. The Rogers Market became a Kroger, and in 2000 Kroger tripled the size of its original Georgetown store, the single largest reinvestment in the center's history. On June 12, 1993, at its twenty-fifth anniversary, the center buried a time capsule in its parking lot, inscribed to be opened on June 12, 2018, at the fiftieth; the capsule was duly dug up and its contents displayed for the golden anniversary, an act of institutional self-confidence no Fort Wayne mall ever got to perform. Tom Jehl's son Steve has managed the square since 1981. Current leasing material lists the center at 215,583 square feet — smaller than its own 1977 figure as the record gives it, a discrepancy carried here rather than resolved — with some forty stores behind the Kroger anchor. Of every center in this section, Georgetown is the one that never needed a rescue.

Sources:

1. KPC News, Garth Snow, "Georgetown Square celebrates 50 years" (May 30, 2018) — the 1968 cornfield, the Jehl family account, the time capsule (also carried in Main Roads & Corridors).
2. Georgetown Square, the center's own History page (georgetownfw.com) — the first section's tenants, the growth past 250,000 square feet by 1977, Kroger's 2000 tripling, Steve Jehl's management since 1981.
3. Allen County Genealogical Society, G Named Places in Allen County — the November 2, 1967 Journal Gazette groundbreaking photograph.
4. Waymarking, Georgetown time capsule record — the 1993 burial and June 12, 2018 opening.
5. NAI Harding Dahm leasing flyer, Georgetown Square — 215,583 square feet, 6302–6770 East State Boulevard.