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The greatest civic production of the planning era was the celebration, in June 1916, of the one-hundredth anniversary of Indiana's admission to statehood. Griswold calls it, even with the handicap of almost continuous cold, rainy weather, "the most auspicious celebration ever held in the city of Fort Wayne." It was organized the way the boulevards were: by committee and subscription. A preliminary mass meeting at the Commercial Club on October 6, 1915, presided over by J. Ross McCulloch, heard Samuel M. Foster, a member of the Indiana Historical Commission; in December a corporation, Fort Wayne's Indiana Centennial Association, was formed with Edward C. Miller, the postmaster, as general chairman and a full slate of standing committees — pageant, publicity, arrangements, homecoming, finance, music, and Captain George L. Byroade commanding the Concordia cadets.
The week opened on Sunday afternoon, June 4, with a union service of music at the pageant grounds in Reservoir Park, a chorus of six hundred trained voices drawn from all the city's churches singing the Fort Wayne Centennial Hymn for the first time. The Industrial Exposition opened June 5 within an enclosure that included the league baseball park on Calhoun Street north of Superior, a long line of booths displaying the products of Fort Wayne factories and jobbers, with daily aeroplane flights by the aviator Heth. Tuesday was Fraternal Day, with a parade of the societies; Wednesday, Homecomers' Day, took former residents on automobile tours of the city they had left; Thursday was Woman's Day — the Women's Building opened in the old high school on East Wayne Street under Mrs. August J. Detzer's committee, its rooms filled with the furniture and wearing apparel of other days, and former President William H. Taft, the day's guest of honor, made several brief addresses.
The Mary Penrose Wayne Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution gave the week its permanent marker: a bronze panel on the park strip at the foot of Dearborn Street in Lakeside, "To the memory of Major John Wyllys and his brave soldiers who were killed near this spot in the battle of Harmar's Ford October 22, 1790, with the Miami Indians, under Chief Little Turtle" — Robert B. Hanna the orator, Taft speaking briefly. On Friday, Musical and Carnival Day, sixteen hundred children gave a physical-training demonstration on West Wayne Street between Harrison and Fairfield, and through the week the teachers and pupils of the Fort Wayne Normal School under Flora Wilber set metal markers on the sites of the city's historic spots. The year's commemorative work reached into Swinney Park as well, where the Johnny Appleseed monument was erected in 1916 — the Appleseed commemorations in full are told in the Folklore chapter.
The centennial year's other great civic project shows the era's confidence running into the war. The Municipal Coliseum — a campaign begun by the Commercial Club in 1911, carried by an 8,000-signature petition — won its November bond referendum by 10,227 votes to 947, authorizing $225,000; Charles R. Weatherhogg was chosen architect and the Allen Hamilton property at Lewis and Clinton was selected as the site. In June 1917, on Mayor Hosey's suggestion, the council deferred the building and put $185,000 of the fund into Liberty bonds; the unbuilt coliseum's site was converted into a temporary city park, and Fort Wayne's municipal coliseum waited until 1952, on another site and another scale, as the Sports chapter records.
Sources: Griswold (1917), Ch. XLIX (centennial week narrative; "The Municipal Coliseum"); Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation Department, published chronology (entry for 1916, Appleseed monument).