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Property holding & leasing · A thin-record entry
On the record
Existence: documented by November 1982. The News-Sentinel’s Cityscapes history of Wayne Knitting Mills (14 November 1982) closes: “The old Wayne Knitting Mills buildings today are owned by Wayne Warehouse, which leases them for public and private use.” That single contemporaneous mention is the whole of the record found for the firm.
Founded / founders: not established. Targeted searching (web, the ACGSI Wayne Knitting Mills pages, the Ward records) found no founding date, founder, incorporation or directory trace under the name.
What it did: on the single mention, owned the former Wayne Knitting Mills buildings at West Main Street and Growth Avenue and leased them “for public and private use” — a property-holding and leasing operation, not a manufacturer.
The Ward question: NOT settled — not established, with the best-fit reading stated. Ward Corporation bought “the entire 120,000-square-foot building where they started their business” in 1980 (entry 35), two years before the Cityscapes mention has Wayne Warehouse owning “the buildings.” The mill complex consists of five buildings (ACGSI), and Ward’s documented purchase was of the one building it occupied (Building #1, 642 Growth Avenue). The reading that fits both records is that Wayne Warehouse held the rest of the complex while Ward held its own building — but no deed, directory listing or second newspaper record was retrieved to prove that split, and a looser or stale Cityscapes usage cannot be excluded on the record in hand. The relation is therefore not established; Allen County deed records and ACPL city-directory work are the owed route.
Conflation risk flagged, and fate: a federal EPA property profile for the former Bowser plant site (2323 Bowser Avenue) names a Wayne Warehousing & Cartage, Inc. “operating on the Site prior to 1963.” That is a differently named company at a different site; whether it is the same enterprise as the Cityscapes “Wayne Warehouse” is not established, and the two are not merged here. Fate: not established — no record after November 1982 was found.
Find them on this page
- § 05 — business
Sources: News-Sentinel, Cityscapes, “Fort Wayne Knitters,” 14 Nov 1982 — http://egen.fortwayne.com/ns/projects/history/scapes30.php ; ACGSI, Wayne Knitting Mills page — https://www.acgsi.org/genweb/fort-wayne/wayne-knitting-mills-fort-wayne-indiana.html ; U.S. EPA ACRES property profile, 2323 Bowser Avenue, Fort Wayne (flagged namesake, not merged). Sources as cited in the profile.