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The Civil War made Fort Wayne a three-daily town, and party politics made each paper. The Fort Wayne Gazette was first printed on May 2, 1863, by printer David W. Jones, with Republican attorney Isaac Jenkinson writing the editorials; Jones wanted, in his own framing, a newspaper "that would support the policies of President Abraham Lincoln" in a county that had gone for Stephen Douglas in 1860 and where the Weekly Sentinel attacked Lincoln vehemently. The Gazette began as the third-largest paper in the city, behind the Sentinel and Dawson's Times, and was the town's only Republican organ in a majority-Democratic county — a position its historian, Scott M. Bushnell, shows it held as both burden and franchise: Democrats bought the Gazette to read what Republicans were saying about them. The Fort Wayne Weekly Journal followed in December 1868 as the Democratic morning paper, and in 1874 William P. Page and Charles E. Taylor founded the Fort Wayne Daily News, a Republican paper that put its emphasis on local news and was remembered as the local "people's paper."
The era also produced the city's strangest editorial alumnus and its first syndicator. The Sentinel was owned for a year and a half in 1878–79 by Fort Wayne native William Rockhill Nelson, who sold out, moved to Kansas City, and built the Kansas City Star into one of the great American newspapers. And in 1877 the Gazette's associate editor, David Keil, organized the Fort Wayne Newspaper Union, selling preprinted sheets — "patent insides" — to smaller rural papers: an early syndication business, run from Fort Wayne, that treated the country press as a network a generation before the wire-service era matured. Under Nathan R. Leonard and, from 1887, his son Frank M. Leonard, the Gazette professionalized — enterprising reporting on a stable financial base — while the Journal carried the Democratic banner. When the Gazette was put up for sale in the spring of 1899, the Journal bought it. The two-paper city that resulted lasted, in one corporate form or another, for 121 years.
Sources: Scott M. Bushnell, Hard News, Heartfelt Opinions: A History of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (Indiana University Press, 2007), as reviewed in the Indiana Magazine of History (2009) and H-Net Reviews (2008); Justin Clark, "Allen County Newspapers: A Short History" (2017); Allen County Genealogical Society, Journal Gazette newspaper record (160th anniversary history, May 2, 2023); Fort Wayne Magazine, "Starting the presses" (July 2015).