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Private Clubs: The Country Clubs and City Clubs
Wealth in Fort Wayne has always had addresses where it gathered by invitation. Some were downtown — a commercial club in an office building, a lecture club at Friday lunch, a dining club twenty-five floors above Berry Street. Most, in the end, were golf courses: the country club was the durable form, and Fort Wayne built them in waves, in 1908, 1924, 1966, and 1989, each new club a map of where the city's money had moved. This section takes the clubs one at a time, from their own records — club histories, city directories, the press, and, in one case, a tax court's stipulated facts. The fortunes of the men who founded and filled these clubs are told in the Wealth section and are not retold here. The service clubs and the charitable work of the lodges belong to the Charities section; what follows keeps to the membership institutions themselves.
Before the country clubs: golf's first Fort Wayne clubs
1889 — 1908
The first courses: Golf reached Fort Wayne in the last years of the nineteenth century, and its first homes were parks, not clubs with gates. The History Center's record of the county's golf artifacts lays the sequence out…
The fraternal layer: Masons, Elks, Eagles, Moose
1865 — the 1920s
A wider door: Beneath the wealthy clubs stood a much larger club world, organized by lodge rather than by fortune. Fort Wayne's city directories list its "secret and benevolent societies" by the dozen. The Masons were the oldest…
The downtown clubs: the Commercial Club and its circle
1892 — 1918
The organizing: Fort Wayne's first great city club was a business club. Two dates stand in the record for its founding, and both are printed here. The National Register nomination for the Randall Building states that Perry A.…
Fort Wayne Country Club
Founded 1908 — 5221 Covington Road
Founding: The Fort Wayne Country Club is the city's oldest surviving country club, and its own account of itself is consistent on the essentials: it was founded in 1908 by 75 charter members, who bought the original 88 acres of a…
The Quest Club
Founded 1 December 1911
A club for papers: The Quest Club is Fort Wayne's most durable idea of a private club: no building, no course, no bar — a membership of business and professional men, and later women, meeting at Friday lunch to hear one of their…
Orchard Ridge Country Club
Founded 1924 — 4531 Lower Huntington Road
Founding: Orchard Ridge was the second country club, built for the automobile age on the city's southwest side. The club's own history states the founding plainly: organized in 1924, and in 1925 the club leased 115 acres of…
Pine Valley Country Club
Founded 1966 — 10900 Pine Mills Road
The north side's club: Pine Valley was the country club of Fort Wayne's postwar northward growth — a club and a housing development built together, the houses rising around the fairways. The club's own present account dates its…
The Summit Club
1970s — 2009 — floors 25 and 26, 110 West Berry Street
The club in the sky: The Summit Club was Fort Wayne's purest city club — no golf, no tennis, only dining, drinking, and the view. It occupied the 25th and 26th floors of the Fort Wayne National Bank Building at 110 West Berry…
Sycamore Hills Golf Club
Founded July 1987 — 11836 Covington Road
A club built for championships: Sycamore Hills was a different kind of founding: not a circle of members pooling dues, but a single fortune building the club it wanted. The club's own clubhouse history dates its founding to July…
The public "clubs": Autumn Ridge and Chestnut Hills
1993 and 1995
The name outlives the form: The 1990s added two more Fort Wayne courses with "club" in the name and no membership at the door, and they belong in this record precisely to mark the boundary. Autumn Ridge Golf Club, at 11420 Old…
Who was inside: membership and its boundaries
The record as it stands
What the record shows: Fort Wayne's private clubs kept their rolls private, and this record prints membership figures only where a dated source states them: the Commercial Club's hundreds, printed proudly in the city directories…
Swingers Clubs
Swingers · the private-club record
Fort Wayne's organized adult social scene left a short public record, and this section prints all of it that print, broadcast, court, and directory sources can prove. The national phenomenon was loud — magazine covers, a famous New York club, a bestselling book — but in a mid-size Midwestern city it ran the way such scenes usually ran here: behind membership doors, in private houses and rented rooms, visible to the general record mainly on the two occasions when government walked into it. The first occasion is an Associated Press dispatch in which the club is not even named. The second is a City Council meeting in the summer of 2019, when the city tried to outlaw the only swingers club it had — a club that had then been operating openly for eight years — and failed by a single abstention. Between and around those two collisions, the record is mostly silent, and the silence is printed here as plainly as the events.
The national pattern, in brief
1971 — 1985
The coverage era: What the postwar press called "wife swapping" became a national magazine subject at the turn of the 1970s. Time treated it as a cover-worthy behavior story on February 8, 1971, under the title "The American Way…
The club at the Hallmark Inn
2000s — the surviving report carries no date
A collision, reported once: The first time Fort Wayne's swingers scene enters the general record, it does so sideways. A state program of the Indiana Department of Correction was housing released offenders — sex offenders among…
The Champagne Club
2011 —
The city's one documented club: In 2011 a private membership club named the Champagne Club opened in Fort Wayne — the opening date given in its business listings, and consistent with the statement, made in open council session…
The summer the city tried to ban it
July — August 2019
Two ordinances: On July 23, 2019, the city administration brought two sexually-oriented-business ordinances before the City Council. One would establish licensing and conduct rules for sexually oriented businesses generally — the…
Where Indiana law drew the line
1991 — 2020
The state case: Indiana's governing adult-entertainment litigation was about dancing, not social clubs, and it was not Fort Wayne's: in Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc. , 501 U.S. 560 (1991), the Supreme Court upheld Indiana's…
The record since, in full
2019 —
Silence, again: After August 2019 the Champagne Club returns to the condition in which it had spent its first eight years: present in business listings, absent from the news. The listings continued to carry the club at its…