Nebraska

Nebraska, just west of downtown across the St. Marys River, grew as an industrial neighborhood. Its anchor was the hosiery factory begun by Theodore F. Thieme as Thieme Brothers Knitting Mills about 1875 and incorporated as Wayne Knitting Mills in 1891; by 1905 the mills employed about 1,100 workers, were the largest maker of knitted hosiery in the world, and spurred the residential development around them. The neighborhood's houses went up chiefly in the early twentieth century along West Main Street and the streets behind it. The name has a documented story, though it survives in imperfect form: the Fort Wayne Sentinel's naming feature of August 10, 1912 — preserved on ACGSI's Irishtown page in uncleaned optical-character-recognition text — describes Nebraska as the part of the city reached after crossing the Main Street bridge going west, where the early settler A. C. Hutzell opened a grocery when there were not more than half a dozen houses. People joked of families out there that they were "moving to Nebraska," because the settlement felt so far away and cut off by the river; Hutzell hung a sign, "The Nebraska Store," and after that everybody spoke of that part of town as Nebraska. The Society for American Baseball Research's history of the Kekionga Ball Grounds tells the same distance story for the surrounding Camp Allen ground. Nebraska's other landmark layer is that ball ground: on the former Camp Allen, the Civil War camp, the Fort Wayne Kekiongas beat the Cleveland Forest Citys 2–0 on May 4, 1871, in the National Association's inaugural game; a monument on the site, now Camp Allen Park, was unveiled on May 4, 2017. A Nebraska Neighborhood Plan was adopted by the Common Council in 2010. Like Bloomingdale and Spy Run, Nebraska never had legally established boundaries.

Nebraska's association is one of the city's oldest — the association itself describes it as the second oldest in Fort Wayne, and the City's activation history says it had been active since the 1970s before a leadership change and falling attendance led the City to begin a Neighborhood Activation process in June 2023. The board rebuilt membership, held the neighborhood's first block party in several years at Swinney Park West in June 2024 (a second followed in June 2025), watched the 1898 Mechanic Street Bridge to Swinney Park reopen on July 24, 2025, and put the neighborhood's memory on its walls: a mural at 1804 West Main Street, dedicated in 2022, works in the Kekionga baseball team, the Wayne Knitting Mills, Camp Allen, Jaenicke Gardens, and Swinney Park, and in the fall of 2025 a portrait wall at West Main and Fry Streets — photographs of residents past and present, with their own words about living in Nebraska — was installed on Nebraska School's property with a City Neighborhood Improvement Grant. The neighborhood's logo, drawn as a quilting block, nods to the knitting mills. Nebraska is part of the Northwest 2035 neighborhood plan adopted June 24, 2025.

Sources: Fort Wayne Sentinel, August 10, 1912, via ACGSI Irishtown page (name account; uncleaned OCR, carried as the 1912 account); Society for American Baseball Research, Kekionga Ball Grounds park history; ACGSI place file, Wayne Knitting Mills (ARCH account, 2018); City of Fort Wayne, Nebraska Neighborhood Activation page, Mechanic Street Bridge page, and "Nebraska Neighborhood celebrates history, looks to the future," October 31, 2025; City of Fort Wayne, Nebraska Neighborhood Mural page; Nebraska Neighborhood Association.