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Fort Wayne’s first bank · Branch of the State Bank of Indiana
On the record
Founded: 25 August 1835. The date is the History Center’s date, quoted on the ACGSI timeline; the year 1835 is agreed by every record-based source in hand, but no contemporaneous primary record for the 25 August date was quoted in hand, so the day is not proven. The parent bank was established in 1833, its bill drafted by Samuel Hanna and enacted 28 January 1834; a Fort Wayne branch was added in 1835.
Founders: Indiana General Assembly (parent bank); Fort Wayne branch organisers named as Allen Hamilton (branch president), Hugh McCulloch (cashier), and directors William Rockhill, Asa Fairfield, Jesse Vermilyea, Francis Comparet and William G. Ewing, among others.
What it did: Fort Wayne’s first established banking institution, ending reliance on banks in the Ohio River Valley and the eastern states. As a branch of the state-chartered system it issued notes, took deposits and lent.
CONFLICT — location, UNRESOLVED: the News-Sentinel city history puts the city’s first bank "on the southwest corner of Main and Clinton streets", while a Business People street-history account and the Fort Wayne Public Library’s 1975 Columbia Street Story both put the first bank at Francis Comparet’s home on the south side of Columbia Street, between Clinton and Calhoun. Both sites are carried, flagged, until a deed, directory or contemporary advertisement settles the sequence. CONFLICT — end of McCulloch’s branch tenure: 1835 to 1857 (Britannica / National Park Service) vs director 1835 to 1856 and president of the successor bank 1856 to 1863 (IU Lilly Library) — a transition-year difference, flagged.
Fate: parent charter expiry 1 January 1859, with an operational handover in 1857. The successor, the Bank of the State of Indiana (called the "privately held Second Bank of Indiana" in the ACGSI/History Center timeline — a variant name for the same successor), opened its branches 1 January 1857 with McCulloch as its first president, until April 1863.
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- § 05 — business
Sources: News-Sentinel city history — http://egen.fortwayne.com/ns/projects/history/rhist7.php ; ACGSI 1830–1839 timeline — https://www.acgsi.org/genweb/county/timeline/1830s-timeline-of-allen-county-indiana.html ; Business People ; The Columbia Street Story (1975) — https://dn721503.ca.archive.org/0/items/columbiastreetst00bate/columbiastreetst00bate.pdf ; Slocum and Robertson (1905) — https://ldsgenealogy.com/IN/books/History-of-the-Maumee-River-basin-Allen-County-Indiana-part-6.htm ; CoinWorld — https://www.coinworld.com/news/paper-money/confusing-names-you-can-bank-on-collecting-paper.html ; Indiana Historical Bureau marker — https://www.in.gov/history/state-historical-markers/find-a-marker/state-bank-of-indiana/ ; IU Lilly Library — https://archives.iu.edu/catalog/InU-Li-VAD6742 . Sources as cited in the profile.