The militia years · the county's standing companies

1824 — the nineteenth century

Citizen soldiers between garrisons: When the Army left in 1819, Allen County's defense became what it was everywhere on the Indiana frontier: the militia. Under Indiana law the able-bodied men of the county were enrolled in militia companies that mustered, elected their officers and held themselves ready for call-out, and the county's first officers and Indian agents — John Tipton, appointed Indian agent at Fort Wayne in March 1823, was himself a militia general — moved between the civil and militia worlds as one. The militia as an institution left fewer buildings than the garrison had; its record is muster rolls, commissions and the companies it produced when a call came.

The clearest Fort Wayne product of the system is the volunteer company of 1846. At the first call for the Mexican War, two full companies were organized at Fort Wayne from Allen County citizens and left town on 1 June 1846, followed to the lower lock five miles out by a procession of parents and friends. Mustered at New Albany on 20 June 1846 as Companies E and F of the 1st Regiment, Indiana Volunteers, they served on guard duty near the mouth of the Rio Grande. Company E carried a name in the old garrison's honor — the "Mad Anthony Guards." Company F was captained by David W. Lewis, Company E's officers are named in the county record, and when the regiment mustered out, Captain Lewis raised a third company, mustered 6 January 1848 as Company K, 5th Indiana, which served to 28 July 1848. The companies' war service belongs to the Wars record; what belongs here is the standing fact behind it: a county of a few thousand people could put two named, officered companies into the field within weeks, because the militia framework already existed. The same framework, renamed and reorganized across the century, is the direct ancestor of the National Guard battalion that still drills in Fort Wayne today — see the 1-293rd, below. Camp Allen, the Civil War rendezvous that stood in the city in 1861, was the militia system's wartime camp form; its roster is in the Wars record.

Sources:

1. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI), "Mexican War Volunteers, 1846–1848, Allen Co., Indiana" — the two companies, the 1 June 1846 departure, the New Albany muster, Company E as the "Mad Anthony Guards," Company K of the 5th Regiment, with officer rosters, from History of Allen County and Valley of the Upper Maumee River.
2. The History Center, History Center Notes & Queries, "General John Tipton's Fort Wayne Connection" — Tipton's March 1823 appointment as Indian agent and his militia standing.
3. Griswold, Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (1917), via the surviving excerpts — the 1861 enrollment of volunteers and Camp Allen's place in the city's war machinery (roster in Wars, Unrest & Disasters).