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Trading post & general store · Samuel Hanna’s store, later S. Hanna & Co.
On the record
Samuel Hanna, aged 22, took his trading venture to Fort Wayne in 1819, the year the garrison withdrew, and built his log store at what became the northwest corner of Barr and Columbia streets. The Barr-and-Columbia intersection marker independently inscribes “North West — Barnett-Hanna Trading Post 1819,” and a near-contemporary memoir quoted in Slocum & Robertson (1905) agrees: Hanna arrived in 1819 and “immediately entered upon mercantile pursuits in a small way,” his first storehouse “a rude log cabin, erected mainly with his own hands.” Founded 1819.
The “Barnett” in the name is James Barnett, Hanna’s early Fort Wayne partner — the partnership is documented as a trading pairing (Lasselle’s trader list, Indiana Magazine of History, written c.1859: “Barnet and Hanna traded at the same place [Fort Wayne]”). The exact years of the Barnett partnership at the post are not established on the sources in hand — Lasselle dates their joint trading 1824–1828, which sits awkwardly against the marker’s 1819 post date; no partnership start year is printed until the Hanna ledgers settle it. The firm’s own books survive from the 1820s: an Indiana Magazine of History study cites “Hanna and Company Ledger A, 1827” and a “Hanna and Company Invoice Book, 1827–1828,” quoted from the originals.
What it did: Indian trade and general merchandising at annuity time — trade goods brought up the St. Marys or overland, exchanged with the Miami and other peoples receiving government annuity payments at the Fort Wayne agency. Hanna was soon appointed agent of the American Fur Company.
Course: the log cabin was superseded by a frame building, then by “a substantial brick block of business houses” on the same corner. Hanna expanded the mercantile operation beyond Fort Wayne — to Lafayette, Wabash and South Bend (the South Bend post run by his clerk, then partner, Lathrop M. Taylor from 1827; the firm there became Hanna and Taylor) — and became an extensive Wabash Valley landowner.
Fate: closed by succession, no single closure date in hand — thin at the end. Hanna died 11 June 1866. The business continued at the old corner under his sons as S. Hanna & Sons, general merchandise, Columbia and Barr — Slocum (1905) names eldest son Jesse Bayless Hanna and son Amos Thomas Hanna as members of that firm and notes the old building was “still in existence” in 1905. When S. Hanna & Sons itself ceased is not established on sources in hand; city-directory work (1858– ) is the route to a closure date.
Find them on this page
- § 05 — business
Sources: History Center Notes & Queries, Castaldi, “Samuel Hanna: The Founder of Fort Wayne” (historycenterfw.blogspot.com); HMdb Barr-and-Columbia marker (hmdb.org/m.asp?m=197325); Slocum & Robertson, History of the Maumee River Basin (1905); Lasselle, “The Old Indian Traders of Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of History (1906); Anson on Lathrop M. Taylor, IMH. Sources as cited in the profile.