The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
For four decades after Lawton, the system grew the way it had begun: by lease, bequest and gift, one tract at a time. Swinney Park came first among the great ones — Colonel Thomas W. Swinney leased his west-side land to the city in 1869, and on his death in 1875 bequeathed house and roughly 240 acres as a public park, the first land donated for park purposes in Fort Wayne; the bequest's life estates kept the city waiting, with part possession in 1893 and full possession only in 1922. The fortune behind the gift is treated in the Wealth chapter. Hayden Park was acquired in 1876. Reservoir Park was developed in 1880, when the city's reservoir was built — a working piece of the water system that doubled as pleasure ground, and that would host the great pageant of 1916. McCulloch Park was given to the city in 1886 by Hugh McCulloch, the Fort Wayne banker who had been Lincoln's comptroller of the currency and Secretary of the Treasury. Hamilton Park was acquired in 1903. With the platting of the Westfield addition in 1908, its owners set aside about eight acres as Rockhill Park for the city's use. Each of these arrived without any plan connecting it to the others; the system's coherence waited for the planners of 1909–1912.
Sources: Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation Department, published chronology (entries for 1869, 1875, 1876, 1880, 1886, 1893, 1903); Griswold (1917), Ch. XLVIII ("Growth of the Park System," for Rockhill Park); Wealth chapter of this history (Swinney bequest and possession dates).