A Board of Their Own — Park Government, 1894–1911

Through the nineteenth century the parks answered to the Board of Public Works: the department's chronology dates a Park Department formed under the Board of Public Works to 1894. The push for an independent board came from Colonel David N. Foster, who in 1895 headed a committee to investigate forming a municipal park board, holding that Fort Wayne should have a city park within a ten-minute walk of every home. The independent Board of Park Commissioners dates its creation to 1905, under the state Cities and Towns Law: Mayor Henry C. Berghoff appointed the first board — Oscar W. Tresselt, David N. Foster, Joseph M. Singmaster and Ferdinand Meier, with Meier elected president — confirmed by council on June 6, 1905, taking the parks over from the Board of Public Works. Griswold tells the same transfer under a legislative act he dates 1906, and the department's own anniversary keeping straddles the two dates — it celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1956 and its sixtieth in 1965 — so the record carries 1905 as the board's appointment and 1906 as Griswold's date for the act under which the department of public parks stood up.

What the board lacked was money it could raise itself. The legislature of 1911 supplied it, giving Fort Wayne what Griswold calls a duplicate of the park law that had benefited Indianapolis: the board of park commissioners could establish boulevards, parks and parkways, pleasure drives and playgrounds, acquire the grounds, and levy a tax against the property benefited — capped, in Griswold's rendering, at a total of 15 per cent of the value of the land. The department's chronology describes the same 1911 taxing law in district terms: the department could declare park districts and tax property within them for improvements in that district, the money not to be moved elsewhere. It was this benefit-tax machinery, as much as any drawing, that built the boulevard system.

Sources: Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation Department, published chronology (entries for 1894, 1895, 1905, 1911, 1956, 1965); Griswold (1917), Ch. XLVIII (the 1906 act; the 1911 law and the 15 per cent levy).