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Mayor of Fort Wayne
On the record
## On the record
Charles Augustus Zollinger was born on 9 December 1838 at Wiesbaden, in the Duchy of Nassau, one of the seven sons of Christian Zollinger. The family emigrated in 1848. His father, a wood turner by trade, settled in Allen County, where he farmed and ran a sawmill; some accounts bring the family west by way of Sandusky, Ohio, first. Charles learned the blacksmith's trade, and he was at the anvil when the Civil War opened.
His war record survives in unusual completeness because the War Department printed it in 1896, in support of his widow's pension claim. He first enlisted in Company E of the 9th Indiana, a three-months regiment, in 1861. That fall he helped recruit a company for the 30th Indiana at Fort Wayne, declining the captaincy in favor of J. W. Whitaker and taking a first lieutenant's commission in Company D instead. He was present with the regiment on 31 December 1862, in the Stones River campaign, and on 1 February 1863 he resigned on a surgeon's certificate of disability: chronic diarrhea attended with pleurisy. The disability bar was removed on 4 January 1864, and he went back. He mustered into the 129th Indiana as a captain on 6 March 1864, was commissioned its lieutenant colonel on 21 March, and its colonel that June, after Colonel Charles Case resigned. The regimental history tradition adds the Atlanta campaign with Sherman, Franklin and Nashville, and the last fighting at Kinston, North Carolina. He mustered out as colonel on 29 August 1865.
After the war he helped organize the town of New Haven and served as the first president of its board of trustees. In October 1870 Allen County elected him sheriff, and he held that office two years.
In May 1873 the voters of Fort Wayne made him mayor, and they kept making him mayor. Re-elected at every successive election, he held the chair continuously to May 1885, and left a balance of $133,000 in the city treasury when he retired, by the Lindenwood history's account. The city named a Clapp and Jones steam fire engine the Charley Zollinger in his honor. Between administrations he spent four years as the United States pension agent at Indianapolis, work the Senate report records without further detail.
He returned to the mayor's office on 7 May 1891. His second administration commissioned Wing and Mahurin to design the City Building, built for $69,256 and dedicated on 20 April 1893. Six weeks later came the street railway strike, the first labor fight the Fort Wayne street railway company had faced. On Memorial Day 1893 the motormen and conductors walked out, demanding fifteen cents an hour in place of thirteen and a half. Substitute crews were pelted with decayed eggs and other missiles. Zollinger issued a proclamation of warning on 1 June. Disorder continued until the night of 2 June, when an open-air mass meeting of perhaps 3,000 people filled the courthouse yard; Sheriff E. F. Clausmeier had sworn in civilian deputies, among them Henry C. Berghoff, who addressed the meeting. An arbitration committee drawn from those deputies settled it: the company conceded the raise, effective 15 June, and the men had won their point.
Zollinger died in office on 27 December 1893, aged 55. The Senate report on his widow's pension gives the cause as disease of the heart. He lay in state in the council chambers of the building he had commissioned, and he is buried in Lindenwood Cemetery. Henry P. Scherer succeeded him. His widow, Mary F. Zollinger, was pensioned at $24 a month under the general law for the disabilities of his service; a Senate committee was still weighing a bill to raise her to $30 a month in April 1902.
A note on the count of his terms, because the printed record disagrees with itself. The Allen County INGenWeb mayors page, quoting G. Stanley Hood's 2015 correction letter in the Journal Gazette, counts six successive two-year terms from 1873, then election for a seventh time in 1891 to a three-year term, and more than fourteen years in the chair in all. A 1956 piece calls him a seven-time mayor on the same arithmetic. Against that, the 1889 Valley of the Upper Maumee River history credits the first administration with five terms, and his modern encyclopedia biography says six terms altogether and calls the 1891 return his sixth. The dates are not in dispute: 1873 to May 1885, an interval under Charles F. Muhler and Daniel L. Harding, then 7 May 1891 to his death. The count of terms within the first administration is where the sources part company, and this page prints the dates and both counts rather than choose silently.
Find them on this page
- § 04 — the mayoral roster
Sources:
- U.S. Senate, Report No. 1243, 57th Congress, 1st Session, "Mary F. Zollinger," ordered printed 23 April 1902, printing the War Department's statement of his service, 13 February 1896.
- Biographical sketch of Charles A. Zollinger in History of Allen County, Indiana (Kingman Brothers, 1880), transcribed at Genealogy Trails.
- Arthur M. Paulison, Pioneers Resting in Historic Lindenwood (Lindenwood Historical Foundation, 1989), part 5.
- B. J. Griswold, A Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, installment 43, Fort Wayne Sentinel, 31 October 1914 (chapter 57, the street railway strike of 1893).
- "Mayors of Fort Wayne," Allen County INGenWeb Project, quoting G. Stanley Hood, letter to the Journal Gazette, 16 January 2015; and the dated List of Mayors of Fort Wayne, Indiana.
- Valley of the Upper Maumee River, vol. 2 (1889), municipal roster and fire department notes.
- City of Fort Wayne, official Fort Wayne Mayors page.
- Peggy Seigel, A Proud Heritage: The History of the Allen County Courthouse (2002), carried from the previous version of this page.