Pliny Hoagland

Canal and railroad engineer · Merchant and banker of Fort Wayne

• Born 31 July 1810

On the record

Pliny Hoagland was born 31 July 1810 near New Philadelphia, Ohio, the fifth son of Moses and Elizabeth Hoagland. Trained as a civil engineer, he worked on Ohio's Sandy and Beaver Canal and in 1838 transferred to the Wabash and Erie Canal service at Toledo and Maumee City. He married Merica Evans at Fort Wayne on 9 September 1844 and, leaving Ohio's engineering service in the fall of 1845, settled in Fort Wayne in the mercantile business with his brother-in-law S. Cary Evans. In 1851 he co-organized the Ohio and Indiana Railroad with Judge Hanna and took, with Hanna and William Mitchell, the construction contract for the 131 miles from Crestline to Fort Wayne; the first passenger coach entered Fort Wayne on 1 November 1854. With Hugh McCulloch and Joseph K. Edgerton he leased the Wabash and Erie Canal in the late 1850s, and with McCulloch he organized the Fort Wayne branch of the Bank of the State of Indiana. He was a director of the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad from 1866 and of the Cincinnati, Richmond and Fort Wayne Railroad from 1871, and from 1859 he served as a trustee of Lindenwood Cemetery, an office he still held at his death in Fort Wayne. His obituary, transcribed by Genealogy Trails, does not give a death year that survived checking, and none is printed.

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• § 06 — people of the record

Sources: Pliny Hoagland obituary transcript, Genealogy Trails (Allen County); Valley of the Upper Maumee River (1889).