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Fort Wayne's first newspaper was an invited one. In 1833, interested citizens of the town promised $500 in backing — the subscribers named in the record are Henry Rudisill, Dr. Lewis G. Thompson, Joseph Holman, C. W. Ewing, Allen Hamilton, and Francis Comparet — and persuaded two Indianapolis printers, Thomas Tigar and Samuel V. B. Noel, to move to Fort Wayne and start a paper. Tigar, born in Beverly, Yorkshire, in 1807 and trained as a printer before emigrating in 1826, set up the press on West Columbia Street; Griswold's account, repeated in every later history, tells how the paper's first press was a used hand press that had printed the Indiana state laws. The first edition of the Fort Wayne Sentinel appeared on July 6, 1833, and its centerpiece was the Declaration of Independence.
The partnership embodied the era's party press and its contradictions. Tigar was a Democrat; Noel was a Whig. To keep the peace between them the paper began as an independent publication. Noel sold out within about a year, the Sentinel became Tigar's Democratic paper, and it briefly flipped Whig in the late 1830s under another owner before settling back. Tigar stayed with the paper, with one four-year interruption, until 1865. The Sentinel went daily in January 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, while keeping its weekly edition. Its later name changes — merged with Dawson's Times as the Times and Sentinel, then published as the Democrat from 1866 to 1873 before the Sentinel name returned — are set out in the Business record; what matters here is the continuity: one editorial office, under changing names, spoke for Democratic Fort Wayne from 1833 forward, and the line runs unbroken to the News-Sentinel of 1918.
Sources: Bert J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (1917), as retold in Fort Wayne Magazine, "Starting the presses" (July 2015); Herbert G. Bredemeier, "Colorful Journalism in Fort Wayne," Quest Club paper, January 28, 1966 (Waynedale News reprint); Justin Clark, "Allen County Newspapers: A Short History," Hoosier State Chronicles, April 18, 2017; ARCH Fort Wayne, News Sentinel Building heritage record. The firm's business line is in the Business chapter.