Catholic missions at the posts

c. 1719–1763, and visiting priests thereafter — before the city

The presence: The first organized religion at the head of the Maumee was Roman Catholic, and it arrived with the French. Jesuit missionaries were established at Fort Miami, the French post beside the Miami town of Kekionga where Fort Wayne now stands, from about 1719; the Catholic Encyclopedia's Indiana history names Fathers St. Pé (in charge until 1734) and Du Jaunay among the priests of the post, and records Jesuits at the Indiana posts "almost continuously down to 1763," when the French regime ended. The congregations of those years were French soldiers, traders and Miami converts.

The long interval: After 1763 there was no resident priest. The same history records that from the end of the French era until after the War of 1812 "there were only visiting priests at Vincennes and Fort Wayne," and that the communicants who remained "were mostly of French origin, remnants of the early days of French sovereignty." The thread resumes with Father Stephen Badin in 1830–31 (see the St. Augustine entry below). The diocesan memory of these years was compiled by Bishop Herman J. Alerding in The Diocese of Fort Wayne, 1857–1907 (1907), whose narrative reaches back to 1669, and by the Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society's sketch The Catholic Church in Fort Wayne (1961), built on Alerding and on Bishop Noll's diocesan histories. The narrative of this section's early centuries is in the Story section of this history.

Sources:

1. Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), "Indiana" — Jesuits at Fort Miami, St. Pé and Du Jaunay, the near-continuous presence to 1763, visiting priests thereafter.
2. Herman J. Alerding, The Diocese of Fort Wayne, 1857–September 1907: A Book of Historical Reference, 1669–1907 (Archer Printing, 1907), as described in the cathedral and diocesan references below.
3. Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society, The Catholic Church in Fort Wayne (1961) — contents and method as digitized at the Internet Archive.