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Later the News-Sentinel · Fort Wayne’s first newspaper
On the record
Thomas Tigar and Samuel V. B. Noel, invited from Indianapolis by Fort Wayne citizens, published the first issue of the Sentinel, the town’s first newspaper, on 6 July 1833. The date and founders agree across the Indiana State Library’s Hoosier State Chronicles history, Fort Wayne Magazine’s “Starting the Presses,” the News-Sentinel’s own city history (“Its first newspaper, the Sentinel, began on July 6, 1833”), and the foundation research report for this record. The first edition printed the Declaration of Independence; its first editorial recapped Hugh McCulloch’s Fourth of July oration. Financial backing of $500 toward a press was promised by Henry Rudisill, Dr. Lewis G. Thompson, Joseph Holman, C. W. Ewing, Allen Hamilton and Francis Comparet — though the Quest Club account notes Tigar and Noel appear not to have needed the advance. Founded 6 July 1833.
Founders: Thomas Tigar (1807– , born Beverly, Yorkshire; printer; with the paper until 1865, apart from a four-year interval under George W. Wood) and S. V. B. Noel (Whig to Tigar’s Democrat; sold his stake to Tigar after about a year, whereupon the paper became Democratic). The press stood on West Columbia Street. The town held about 300 people.
What it did: Fort Wayne’s first and for years defining newspaper — weekly at first, four small pages filled mostly with Washington and foreign news reprinted from Detroit and Cincinnati papers; the Daily Sentinel was first issued in January 1861.
Course: name and ownership churn, carried as a lineage: the Sentinel became for a time the Times and Sentinel after merging with the Dawson Times, was renamed The Democrat under new ownership in 1866, and took the Sentinel name back in 1873 (Fort Wayne Magazine). Fort Wayne native William Rockhill Nelson owned it in 1878–79 before founding The Kansas City Star. In 1918 the Sentinel merged with the Fort Wayne Daily News (founded 1874) to form the News-Sentinel — the basis of the paper’s own claim, carried in the News-Sentinel city history, to be “the longest continually operating company in Allen County” (a company claim, printed here as a claim, not as an established fact).
Fate: closed — print ended 2017–18; publication suspended 23 April 2020 (documented in this chapter; a foundation research report's November 2020 dating is the summary error the chapter corrects).
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- § 05 — business
Sources: Hoosier State Chronicles / Indiana State Library, Fort Wayne newspaper history (blog.newspapers.library.in.gov); Fort Wayne Magazine, “Starting the Presses”; News-Sentinel city history; Waynedale News, “Colorful Journalism” (Bredemeir Quest Club paper, 1966); foundation research report for this record. Sources as cited in the profile.