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Mayor of Fort Wayne
On the record
The most credentialed man to hold the office in the nineteenth century: an Indiana Supreme Court justice (1858–65, and again 1871–82) who was elected mayor in 1865 and resigned within a year to return to his law practice.
James Lorenzo Worden was born 10 May 1819 at Sandisfield, Massachusetts, and moved to Fort Wayne in 1849, where he lived the rest of his life. He served as prosecuting attorney for the Tenth Circuit from 1851 and as its judge from 1855. Appointed to the Indiana Supreme Court on 15 January 1858 and elected that fall, he sat on the state's high court through the Civil War years until January 1865. Elected mayor of Fort Wayne in 1865, he resigned the office after about a year under the pressure of his law practice — the mayoralty was a brief interlude in a judicial career. Voters returned him to the Supreme Court in 1870, and he served a second tenure from January 1871 until his resignation in December 1882. He died in Fort Wayne on 10 June 1884.
Find them on this page
- § 04 — the mayoral roster
Roster cross-checked between the City of Fort Wayne’s official mayors page and the full dated list — sources printed under the roster in § 04. Further sources: Indiana Supreme Court justice lists; Griswold; Monks (ed.), Courts and Lawyers of Indiana, Vol. I (1916); Indiana Supreme Court chronology; Wikipedia, "James Worden."