The forts as posts · three stockades, one garrison, 1794–1819

22 October 1794 — 19 April 1819

A post before it was a town: Fort Wayne began as a standing garrison, and for twenty-five years the post — not any civil government — was the settlement. General Anthony Wayne's Legion reached Kekionga on 17 September 1794, and Wayne personally selected the site near the present intersection of Berry and Clay streets. The first stockade was finished by 17 October, built strong enough, in the contemporary description, to withstand 24-pound cannon, and was dedicated on 22 October 1794 — the fourth anniversary of Harmar's defeat — with fifteen cannon rounds for the fifteen states. Command went to Colonel Jean François Hamtramck, formerly commandant at Vincennes. The garrison normally numbered about one hundred men, with their families; the post was headquarters for the American military presence in the West, an Indian agency sat alongside it, and post life — orderly books, agency accounts, courts and supply — is the institutional record the Story chapters draw on. The siege of September 1812 is told in the Wars record and is not retold here.

The first fort was hastily built and crowded, and it did not last. Colonel Thomas Hunt — a veteran of Lexington, Bunker Hill and Wayne's Legion — took command on 16 May 1798 and built a substantial second fort a few hundred feet north, near the present Old Fort Park, with multiple guard houses and agency buildings. That second post was the one besieged in 1812. After the war, Major John Whistler — who had helped build the first fort in 1794 — commanded from 1814 and built the third and last fort on the Hunt site in 1815–1816, designed so a garrison of only fifty to seventy-five men could defend it. It is Whistler's post that the modern Old Fort reconstruction copies. The commanders in sequence, as the post's own record gives them, run: Hamtramck, Thomas Pasteur, David Strong, Hamtramck again, Hunt, and through the 1812 years to Whistler and finally Major Josiah N. Vose, the last commandant. With Native hostilities ended, the Army abandoned the post on 19 April 1819 and shipped its contents to Fort Detroit. The Indian agent remained as caretaker and leased rooms in the empty buildings; the post rotted in place, and its last building was torn down in 1852 — the relic canes cut from its timbers are in the Museums record. The city was platted in 1823 on ground the garrison had made American.

Sources:

1. Historic Fort Wayne, Inc., Old Fort brochure and fort sequence (oldfortwayne.org) — the three American posts, garrison strengths of about 100 and of 50–75, dedication and decommissioning dates.
2. ARCH Inc., "Last two American forts" (archfw.org) — first fort at Berry and Clay, Hunt's replacement at Main and Clay, Whistler's 1814–1816 rebuild, the 1819 transfer and the 1852 demolition.
3. "Fort Wayne (Indiana fort)" — commander succession, Hunt's 16 May 1798 assumption of command, Vose as last commandant, contents shipped to Fort Detroit.