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Mayor of Fort Wayne
On the record
Four separate administrations, the city's most-returned mayor; held the office across three decades.
Hosey was born in New Orleans in 1854 and built the most durable mayoral career in the city's history on a reform platform: the 1905 campaign that first elected him promised a municipal light plant, railroad track elevation and lower water rates (Jesse Greene's study in the Indiana Magazine of History, 2017). In office he governed a wide-open city — Greene documents tolerated gambling, liquor and prostitution — and in 1913 he favored re-establishing a segregated vice district rather than suppressing it. Barred from succeeding himself in 1910, he simply returned: back in 1914, back again in 1922, beaten by Geake in 1925, and back once more in 1929, defeating Jacob Bill, for a fourth term that carried the city through the worst of the Depression.
Find them on this page
- § 04 — the mayoral roster
Roster cross-checked between the City of Fort Wayne’s official mayors page and the full dated list — sources printed under the roster in § 04. Further sources: Jesse Greene, 'Political Boss and Paradox: Mayor William J. Hosey of Fort Wayne, Indiana,' Indiana Magazine of History 113 (2017); ACGSI and Political Graveyard.