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The Sentinel's rival arrived with the Whig Party. The Fort Wayne Times was established by George W. Wood — the merchant who became Fort Wayne's first mayor — dated 1840 in the Business record on the strength of a surviving issue of August 29, 1840, against a later tradition of 1841. The paper's defining figure was John W. Dawson, who with T. N. Hood leased the Times in 1853 and became its sole owner the following year, beginning a daily edition on July 16, 1854 (the Chronicling America catalog dates Dawson's Daily Times from 1855; the one-year difference in the daily's start is carried in the note filed with this chapter). Under Dawson the Times became the city's Whig and then Republican voice, and Dawson himself became one of the most quoted editors in Indiana — combative, literary, and nationally reprinted.
Dawson's most durable contribution to Fort Wayne was a name. The nickname "Summit City" — for the town's position at the summit of the Wabash and Erie Canal's elevation — is credited to Dawson's Times by the News-Sentinel's own published timeline of the city. Through the Civil War the paper appeared as Dawson's Daily Times and Union, and after the war the Times line folded into the Sentinel combination described in the Business record; the separate Times title ended in 1866. Dawson's Fort Wayne years ended in a federal appointment to Utah Territory, but the editorial model he set — the editor as a public character whose prose was the paper — governed Fort Wayne journalism for the next century.
Sources: Bredemeier, "Colorful Journalism in Fort Wayne" (1966); News-Sentinel city timeline (egen.fortwayne.com); Library of Congress, Chronicling America title records for Dawson's Daily Times and Dawson's Daily Times and Union; the Business chapter's Fort Wayne Times entry for the 1840/1841 founding evidence.