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Printer · Co-founder and first editor of the Fort Wayne Sentinel
On the record
Thomas Tigar was born in England in 1807 (Fort Wayne Magazine gives Beverly, Yorkshire; the Lindenwood pioneers volume gives London) and crossed to America in 1826 as a trained printer, landing at Ashtabula, Ohio. In Indianapolis he joined S. V. B. Noel, and Fort Wayne's leading citizens — among them Henry Rudisill, Allen Hamilton, and Francis Comparet — invited the pair to bring a press to the town, promising $500 of backing. The first number of the Sentinel, Fort Wayne's first newspaper, appeared on 6 July 1833, printed on West Columbia Street, with the Declaration of Independence in its columns. Noel, a Whig, left within about a year; Tigar, a strong Democrat, stayed with the paper until 1865, apart from a four-year interval under George W. Wood, recording the frontier village's growth for thirty-two years. In January 1861 he issued the first number of the Daily Sentinel. He died in 1875 and is buried in Lindenwood Cemetery. The paper he founded, through its mergers, ran until the News-Sentinel suspended publication on 23 April 2020.
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Sources: Fort Wayne Magazine, "Starting the presses" (July 2015); Pioneers Resting in Historic Lindenwood (ACPL, 1989); ARCH Fort Wayne, News Sentinel Building.