Fort Wayne Population History: Census by Census Since 1830

Population & Demographics · The count of Fort Wayne

Every other section of this history describes a place; this one counts it. Fort Wayne has been counted by the United States census since 1830, when the enumerators found 996 people in the six-year-old Allen County, and the count has been taken every ten years since without a miss. Read straight, the two series — the county's and the city's — tell the whole shape of the story: a county that multiplied twenty-nine times over in its first thirty years and has never once shrunk, and a city that grew for a century and a half, dipped exactly once, in 1980, and then resumed growing largely by redrawing its own borders. The numbers in this section come from the census record itself and from census-derived publications; where a figure in circulation could not be traced to the census, it is not printed, and where the census record contradicts a figure printed elsewhere in this history, the conflict is named.

One warning belongs at the head of the table, because everything after it depends on it. The county series is a true like-for-like series: Allen County's outline was settled early — the Census Bureau's county history records no significant boundary change after 1840 — so a county figure from 1850 and a county figure from 2020 count the same ground. The city series is not like-for-like. Fort Wayne has repeatedly annexed the suburbs its own growth created, so the city count jumps by annexation as well as by birth and arrival: the land inside the city line measured 79 square miles at the 2000 census and 110.6 square miles at the 2020 census. The annexations themselves, their dates and their politics, are told in the Government section; here they are flagged at the censuses where they move the number.