Hosey Dam: the city's hand on the Maumee

1925 — TODAY

A hundred-year-old argument, in concrete: About a mile and a half below the confluence, at the Anthony Boulevard crossing, the Maumee meets the only dam ever built across it in Fort Wayne. The Hosey Dam — National Inventory of Dams No. IN00810 — is a concrete dam finished in 1925, ten feet high and 475 feet long, named for Mayor William J. Hosey, whose administration's plaque in the powerhouse wall reads "Maumee River Dam and Hydro Electric Plant — William J. Hosey, Mayor 1923–1925." It generated electricity in its early life — the national hydropower inventory still lists a potential capacity of about 0.8 megawatts — and it holds the downtown rivers at a managed pool: City Utilities can lower the levels a few feet by opening its tainter gate, "similar to opening a drain in a bathtub," under a gate policy formalized in 2007 that leaves the gate open from mid-October to mid-April for a low winter pool and closes it for the summer recreation level. As recently as November 2026 the gate was opened to drop the rivers for seven to eight weeks of bridge-pier and stormwater-outfall inspections.

What the dam was for is genuinely unsettled in the record, and the disagreement is printed rather than resolved. The Upper Maumee watershed management plan states flatly that it "was installed in 1925 as a flood control measure." The photographic and industrial-history record assembled on the Allen County dams page offers two other period purposes — hydroelectric power, which it certainly performed, and sewage dilution at a time "when most sewers emptied into the rivers," raising the pool to thin the waste and "lower the smell" — and notes skeptically that whatever the intention, "the rollers could not be raised high enough to halt the flood waters"; the roller gates are long disabled, reported in a 2010 photographic account as last raised during the 1982 flood. The dam's second century has opened as a debate: a 2009 city study examined reviving hydropower at Hosey and the St. Joseph dam; in August 2023 WANE reported the dam "may be demolished," the city citing ecological factors; a September 2024 Journal Gazette editorial was costing out the removal of the trees that jam against it — more than $100,000, the city said, for one large tree; and under a $2,419,619 U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service National Fish Passage award running March 2024 to February 2027, City Utilities is completing a feasibility study for the dam's removal, in the same project that took out the Spy Run dams for the sake of endangered mussels and their host fish. The dam that was built to make the river useful is being studied, a century on, for whether the river is better off without it. The study, not this record, will settle it.

Sources:

1. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, National Inventory of Dams (No. IN00810), via the inventory record — concrete construction, 1925 completion, ten-foot height, 475-foot length, tainter gates.
2. Upper Maumee River Watershed Management Plan — the flood-control purpose as stated, and the dam's age against a fifty-year expected life.
3. Allen County Genealogical Society, Dams of Allen County page — the Hosey plaque, the Anthony Boulevard site, the hydroelectric service, the dilution account and the flood-control skepticism, the Tainter Gate Policy of 2007, and the 2024 logjam editorial.
4. WANE-TV, August 17, 2023 — "Fort Wayne dam may be demolished; city cites ecological factors."
5. U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, National Fish Passage Program award to Fort Wayne City Utilities ($2,419,619, project period 2024–2027) — the Hosey removal feasibility study and the Spy Run Dam removal.
6. City Utilities notices (November 2024; November 2026) — gate openings to lower river levels for outfall and bridge-pier inspection work.