1854 — the first railroad, and the road to Chicago

1850–1869 · OHIO & INDIANA · FORT WAYNE & CHICAGO · PITTSBURGH, FORT WAYNE & CHICAGO

Hanna's road: Fort Wayne's railroad age was promoted, financed and largely willed into being by Samuel Hanna, the city's great canal-era merchant, who saw that the next system would be iron. When the Ohio and Pennsylvania Railroad reached Crestline, Ohio, Hanna led the Allen County subscription drive for the Ohio and Indiana Railroad, chartered to continue the line west to Fort Wayne; in 1852 Hanna, Pliny Hoagland and William Mitchell took the construction contract. The enterprise nearly failed — its president resigned and Hanna took his place — but work resumed in 1853, and the Ohio and Indiana was completed to the south side of Fort Wayne on 31 October 1854. The first locomotive, brought in pieces by canal boat as told above, was assembled and put to work; the first railroad excursion train arrived in Fort Wayne from the east on 15 November 1854. The track at first swung north down Lafayette Street to a frame depot and engine house at the canal basin at the foot of Columbia Street, so that freight could pass directly between boat and rail — the two systems shaking hands at the moment the newer one arrived to replace the older. A retrospective in the Fort Wayne News of 19 February 1907 dates the Ohio and Indiana's entry into the city to the fall of 1855 and gives the building contract at $740,000 let to Hanna, Hoagland and Mitchell; the railroad histories and the station's National Register record give the completion as the fall of 1854, and both datings stand in the record.

West to Chicago: Even before the eastern line arrived, Hanna and his colleagues were building west. The Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad, formed at a meeting at Warsaw in September 1852 with Hanna as its first president, opened its first section, Fort Wayne to Columbia City, in February 1856 — and there the money ran short, with only some twenty miles in service. The rescue was consolidation: on 26 July 1856 (the date local accounts often round to August) the Ohio and Pennsylvania, the Ohio and Indiana and the Fort Wayne and Chicago merged as the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad — a single line of about 467 miles from Pittsburgh to Chicago, among the most direct routes between the East and the lakes. The line was completed through to Chicago in 1858. In 1869 the Pennsylvania Railroad leased the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago, and Fort Wayne became a principal point on the Pennsylvania's great Pittsburgh–Chicago main line — the "Fort Wayne Line" — a status it held for a century. The corporations as firms are carried briefly in the Business section; the road as a place in the city's life is the subject of everything that follows.

Sources: History Center, "Samuel Hanna: The Founder of Fort Wayne" (from Fort Wayne Magazine) — the subscription drive, the 1852 contract, the 1854 completion, the Fort Wayne and Chicago's formation and Hanna's presidency, the 1856 union and the 1858 completion to Chicago; NRHP record for the Pennsylvania Railroad Station (historic-structures.com) — the first excursion train, 15 November 1854, the 1869 Pennsylvania lease; Fort Wayne Line history — the Ohio and Indiana opened Crestline to Fort Wayne in 1853–54, the consolidation of 26 July 1856; ACGSI, "First Things in Fort Wayne" — the Fort Wayne News retrospective of 19 February 1907, carried openly where it conflicts.