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General store and tavern-house · Henderson’s house, Columbia & Calhoun
On the record
The News-Sentinel city history places the opening in its 1828 sequence: “Zenas Henderson opened a general store at the northeast corner of Calhoun and Columbia streets.” No year is stated in the sentence itself; 1828 is the passage’s year, carried here as c.1828, documented as a passage claim, thin. Independently, a settler reminiscence describing Columbia Street as it was on her family’s arrival in the fall of 1830 places Henderson firmly on that corner by then.
What it did: a general store at the northeast corner of Calhoun and Columbia — and, on the same corner, a brick house that functioned as one of the town’s three early hotels/taverns. The Reminiscences of Old Fort Wayne (1906, from a resident who arrived in 1830): of the Columbia Street hotels, two (Suttenfield’s and the Ewings’) “were frame; the third one belonged to Zenas Henderson, situated on the northeast corner of Columbia and Calhoun streets, and was of brick. Across the street from Henderson’s Tavern was John B. Bourie’s trading house.” The same reminiscence also mentions a “Henderson’s ball alley” further along Columbia. Whether store and tavern were one business or two ventures of the same man on the same corner is not established on sources in hand — this entry carries both records without merging them into a single invented firm.
Course: the house was a civic-social venue. A printed invitation preserved in Detzer’s Daily Life in Early Fort Wayne (1954) gives the Christmas Temperance Ball, Tuesday 24 December 1833, “to be given at the house of Z. Henderson, in the town of Fort Wayne” (managers: Isaac Spencer, Joseph Swinney, W. Rankin, Thomas Johnson, R. J. Dawson) — a contemporaneous printed invitation, quoted in full, so Henderson’s house in operation at Christmas 1833 is documented. Griswold’s Pictorial History (1917), describing the oldest surviving Sentinel file, lists “Henderson & Kincaid” among the persons and concerns mentioned in an August 1834 issue — evidence a Henderson mercantile partnership was in print in 1834, though whether it is this store under a partner’s name is not established.
Fate: no closure, sale or renaming date found — thin at the end. The 1858–59 Williams’ directory is the owed route.
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- § 05 — business
Sources: News-Sentinel city history; Reminiscences of Old Fort Wayne (1906); Detzer, Daily Life in Early Fort Wayne (1954), Part 2; Griswold, Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (1917), Part 35. Sources as cited in the profile.