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1832–1882 · THE FIRST TRANSPORT SYSTEM
The summit: The first transportation system built to Fort Wayne was not a railroad but a ditch. The Wabash and Erie Canal, ground for which was broken at Fort Wayne in February 1832, made the city the summit level of a waterway that climbed from Toledo on Lake Erie to the head of the Maumee and descended the Wabash valley toward the Ohio. Boats were running between Fort Wayne and Toledo by the mid-1830s; the canal was completed through to Lafayette in 1843 and to Evansville in 1853, when its 468 miles made it the longest canal in North America. For twenty years every ton of freight and nearly every traveller that reached Fort Wayne came by water, and the canal basin at the foot of Columbia Street was the city's front door. The Story and Business sections carry the canal as commerce; here it matters as the first system — the one the railroad was built to kill, and did.
The succession: The succession was literal. The first locomotive to reach Fort Wayne arrived in 1854 not under steam but as freight — shipped in pieces from Toledo by canal boat, unloaded at the canal landing and assembled in Francis Comparet's warehouse, as the next entry tells. The canal company's own Fort Wayne section, sold after the waterway failed, passed to Thomas Fleming and in 1881 was resold by him to the new Nickel Plate Railroad; in 1882 the Nickel Plate dismantled the canal aqueduct across the St. Marys River and laid its tracks on the canal's own route through the city, so that for a time trains ran where the boats had run, on the same surveyed line. The two-mile Nickel Plate elevation of 1953–56, which obliterated most of what remained of the canal downtown, is told in its own entry below.
Sources: Rex M. Potterf, "The Wabash and Erie Canal," Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society (1957) — the Fleming purchase and 1881 resale to the Nickel Plate, the 1882 aqueduct dismantling, trains on the canal route; ACGSI Railroad History of Fort Wayne — the first locomotive's arrival by canal barge from Toledo and its assembly in Comparet's warehouse; the canal's completion dates and 468-mile length as carried in the Story section's record.