The bridges, as crossings

1812 — 1923

Three rivers meant the town was always building bridges: The earliest picture of a Fort Wayne bridge is a woodcut: the state historic bridge survey, quoting Lossing's Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812, describes "the wooden timber trestle and kingpost bridge across the Maumee directly below the confluence," joining the fort town to the orchard shore that became Lakeside. The covered-bridge era left one documented city span: Gould's covered-bridge inventory reports a timber covered bridge of about 300 feet on East Main Street over the Maumee, standing from about 1863 to about 1890, badly burned in 1888 and repaired within a month; Griswold adds that the county then built its replacement at East Main "to replace a former structure which had passed into a state of decay." For the 1865 state fair, the town threw a pontoon bridge across the St. Marys to join the fairgrounds to the streets — the rivers as obstacles to be improvised over.

The iron era arrived, by the bridge survey's account, with a span "reputedly the city's first iron bridge" on the Wells Street line in 1859, built to reach the Bloomingdale neighborhood. Its successor is the city's bridge treasure: the Wells Street Bridge of 1884, a pin-connected Whipple through-truss by the Wrought Iron Bridge Company of Canton, Ohio — the only iron truss bridge left in Fort Wayne, listed on the National Register in 1988, and now a pedestrian link in the riverfront ground it once served with wagons. The survey counts the family it belonged to: near-identical iron spans followed at Spy Run (1888), Main Street (about 1890), and Columbia Avenue (1891), with country crossings at Hale Street (1882), Bluffton Road (1895), and Anthony Boulevard (1896) drawn later into the city; of them all, Wells Street and Hale Street survive. The concrete-arch generation closed the sequence this entry covers: Tennessee Avenue over the St. Joseph (1912), Tecumseh Street over the Maumee (1912 by the bridge inventory; 1913 in some local accounts), and the Columbia Street bridge of 1923 — 418 feet of concrete arch designed by A. W. Grosvenor and built by the I. E. Smith Construction Company for $188,990, on the crossing the city had argued over, in the newspapers' "Reds and Whites" town meetings of 1922, as the "Anthony Wayne bridge." The crossings' later lives — which neighborhoods they made, which streets they fed — belong to the Corridors and Maps sections; what they crossed is the subject here.

Sources:

1. Indiana Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology, historic bridge survey, via HistoricBridges.org — the c. 1812 trestle-and-kingpost woodcut, the East Main covered bridge and its 1888 fire, the Columbia Street bridge's 1923 construction and $188,990 cost, and the 1922 "Anthony Wayne bridge" meetings.
2. George Gould, Indiana Covered Bridges Thru the Years (1977), as cited in the bridge survey.
3. National Register nomination and HistoricBridges.org documentation, Wells Street Bridge — the 1859 predecessor "reputedly the city's first iron bridge," the 1884 Whipple truss, and the iron-bridge family at Spy Run, Main, and Columbia.
4. B. J. Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (1917) — the East Main replacement and the 1865 state-fair pontoon bridge over the St. Marys.