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The modern map of Fort Wayne is not an object but a service, and it has an author worth naming. Allen County's iMap portal (acimap.us) serves the county's geographic data through public viewers — Data, Engineering, Property Search, the Election Board viewer, the Treasurer's public access, and a parks and trails finder — down to the level of the individual parcel: its lines, its tax bill, its recorded history. The county's GIS program is run by its coordinator, Dave Estes, whom the County Commissioners recognized in 2023 for a singular record: as the county's account puts it, he is the only person in the world to have won Esri's Special Achievement in GIS award three times, and he does it as the program's only full-time county employee. Fitting the oldest tradition in this chapter, the data itself is public: Allen County's GIS data is public domain by county ordinance, carrying no use restrictions — the twenty-first century's version of the survey plats any citizen could copy at the land office.
The city keeps its own doors into the same record: the City of Fort Wayne's GIS site (maps.cityoffortwayne.org), and the Community Development division's map library, which publishes the working geographies of city policy — annexation history, census data, flood plain, neighborhood quadrants, and political boundaries. On May 8, 2024, the city launched Data Fort Wayne, its open-data face for neighborhood statistics, announcing it with the count the Neighborhoods chapter uses: 458 neighborhoods. Underneath all of it, holding the digital map to the earth, are the Allen County Surveyor's cornerstones from the 1820s survey — four to the square mile — from which the county's coordinates, parcels, and 911 addresses still descend. The Current chapter follows the city these maps now describe; the maps themselves end where they began, with the measured ground at the meeting of the rivers.
Sources: Allen County iMap (acimap.us) and its public viewers; ACGSI, Maps of Allen County, Indiana, and Allen County INfo (July 28, 2023), on Dave Estes's three Esri Special Achievement in GIS awards and the iMap portal; OpenStreetMap Indiana wiki, quoting GIS Coordinator Dave Estes on the county ordinance making Allen County GIS data public domain; City of Fort Wayne GIS (maps.cityoffortwayne.org); Fort Wayne Community Development maps pages (fwcommunitydevelopment.org); City of Fort Wayne, Data Fort Wayne launch announcement, May 8, 2024, via ACGSI neighborhoods page.