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The land donor behind the Pennsy Shops
On the record
In 1857 the railroad picked Fort Wayne for its construction and repair shops on land Samuel Hanna donated — the Pennsy Shops, employing some 3,950 by 1913, building locomotives until after the First World War and rebuilding them until 1933: “Altoona of the West.”
The History Center holds the Samuel Hanna papers (§ 08).
Samuel Hanna's own chronology deserves setting out in full. He was born 18 October 1797 in Scott County, Kentucky, and taken to Dayton, Ohio, in 1804. He first saw the Maumee country as a sutler, with his brother Thomas, at the Treaty of St. Mary's in 1818, and arrived in Fort Wayne in 1819, aged twenty-two, to trade (see his store's entry in the business section). He was the town's first postmaster in 1824, sat as an associate judge of the circuit court, and served in the state legislature.
The History Center credits Hanna with the first practical conception of the Wabash and Erie Canal, and the canal made his career: in 1827 he rode the feeder-canal survey with David Burr and the surveyor John Smythe — in the canal association's telling, Hanna had to fetch the instruments from New York, Burr collapsed from exhaustion, and Smythe died of fever. Hanna served as canal commissioner and then fund commissioner from 1828 to 1836 and chaired the canal committee; he officiated at the groundbreaking on 22 February 1832. As committee chairman he drafted the charter of the State Bank of Indiana (approved 28 January 1834) and became president of its Fort Wayne branch. He platted Hanna's Addition in 1836–37, promoted plank roads — personally superintending the first ten miles of the Fort Wayne and Lima plank road — built his Greek Revival house at 1002 East Lewis Street in 1845, and turned to railroads: he induced Allen County's $100,000 subscription and donated land for the Pennsylvania Railroad's 1857 shops. His firm continued as S. Hanna & Sons. He died 11 June 1866 and was given a public funeral; his papers are held by the History Center.
Find them on this page
- § 02 — the Story of Fort Wayne section
- § 05 — business
From § 02, § 05 and the archive survey in § 08; History Center, Castaldi, "Samuel Hanna: The Founder of Fort Wayne"; Slocum & Robertson, History of the Maumee River Basin (1905); Valley of the Upper Maumee River (1889).