The Old Fort as an open-air museum

Historic Fort Wayne, Inc., 1964 — the reconstructed fort opened 1976

Building a fort to keep: The reconstructed Old Fort on Spy Run Avenue is a museum whose collection is a place. Historic Fort Wayne, Inc. was established in 1964 to plan a reconstruction of the 1815–16 post from Major John Whistler's 1814 drawings; the Historical Society announced its own "Historic Old Fort Wayne" initiative in 1966, and the project — costing nearly 1.5 million dollars — was built by Lok-N-Logs Inc. of Sherburne, New York, which assembled the fort in New York, took it apart, and reassembled it on ground a few blocks north of the original site. It was dedicated on 5 June 1976, work unfinished, and opened shortly before the Fourth of July, in the full fever of the Bicentennial, with year-round programming and first-person interpretation of life at the fort in 1816.

Debt, closure, revival: The first year ended with 580,000 dollars in debt. The fort stayed open daily into the early 1990s; the original Historic Fort Wayne, Inc. disbanded in 1989, and rising costs and debts forced the gates closed in 1993, when the buildings passed to the Fort Wayne Parks Department. A new Historic Fort Wayne, Inc. formed in 2004 as an all-volunteer nonprofit, and under its care the city-owned fort again holds near-monthly living-history programs across the site's periods.

Sources:

1. Historic Fort Wayne, Inc. (oldfortwayne.org) and ACGSI — the 1964 founding, Whistler's 1814 drawings, the Lok-N-Logs build and reassembly, the opening shortly before 4 July 1976, the 1989 disbanding and the 2004 volunteer refounding.
2. Todd Pelfrey, "A Fort Reborn," Ball State University digital research (from Old Fort News) — the Historical Society's 1966 initiative, the cost of nearly 1.5 million dollars, the June 1976 opening, 580,000 dollars of debt at the end of the first year, the 1993 closure and the transfer to the Parks Department.