The Grand Army of the Republic: the veterans who ran the lodge city

1867 — c. 1936

The dominant order of the postwar city: The Grand Army of the Republic was a fraternity with one qualification no money could buy: an honorable Union discharge. Fort Wayne's GAR story begins almost with the order itself — the national post history kept by the Sons of Union Veterans records an early post existing in Fort Wayne by May 1867, meeting in the Odd Fellows' Hall on Calhoun Street, on the evidence of the Fort Wayne Daily Gazette of May 1, 1867; a Post No. 72, known to the records only by its number, was organized before May 1869. The durable posts came in the order's great organizing wave. Sion S. Bass Post No. 40 was organized in 1882 and named for the city's own colonel: Sion St. Clair Bass of the 30th Indiana, who died at Paducah, Kentucky, on April 13, 1862, of the wounds he took at Shiloh six days before. Anthony Wayne Post No. 271 followed in 1883, and the 1891–92 directory shows three posts meeting across the city — Bass Post at Nill's Hall, 80 Calhoun, Anthony Wayne Post at Nill's Hall on alternate Fridays, and George Humphrey Post No. 530 at Foster Hall — with a GAR Hall of their own at the northwest corner of Calhoun and Berry in the 1889–90 directory. (The Sons of Union Veterans' summary treats No. 530 as an alternate number in the Anthony Wayne line; the directory of 1891–92 lists the two posts separately, and the discrepancy is carried as it stands.)

At its height the GAR was not one lodge among many but the city's presiding fraternity — the posts officered its commemorations, and when the Department of Indiana held its annual encampment at Fort Wayne in 1907, the department's next commander could write in the official journal that the great honor of his life had come to him "one year ago at Fort Wayne," while the cameras caught the old men's parade. The auxiliaries filled out the order's household: the Ladies of the GAR kept the S. W. Stirk Circle in the 1915 directory, and the Sons of Veterans kept Captain James B. White Camp No. 171. Then the arithmetic of the thing asserted itself: a veterans' order dies with its veterans. The Lawton-Wayne Post No. 271 — the Anthony Wayne post under its later combined name — disbanded in 1925. On October 23, 1926, the surviving members of the Len Dailey Post No. 33 transferred into a consolidated Bass Lawton Post, the posts merging as the ranks thinned. The state archives' post table carries the Bass post's records from 1882 to 1936 and beyond, and by 1954 the Public Library's pamphlet on Colonel Bass already speaks of his post in the past tense: "Not many years ago, the Fort Wayne post of the Grand Army of the Republic was an active organization. Today that post... is no longer in existence." The GAR's hall, its encampments and its dead are treated in the Wars and War Heroes sections; what belongs here is its place in the lodge order of the city — for forty years, the first fraternity of Fort Wayne.

Sources:

1. Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, Indiana GAR posts historical summary and post tables — the 1867 post, Post No. 72, Bass Post No. 40 (1882), Anthony Wayne Post No. 271 (1883–1925), Colonel Bass's death record.
2. Indiana Archives and Records Administration, Grand Army of the Republic records, Vol. II, Appendix B — Bass Post dates 1882–1936+.
3. R. L. Polk & Co., Fort Wayne city directories, 1889–90, 1891–92, 1915 — the three posts, the GAR Hall, the Stirk Circle, the Sons of Veterans camp.
4. Journal of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Session, Department of Indiana, GAR (Kokomo, 1908) — the Fort Wayne encampment of the year before.
5. Allen County Genealogical Society military pages — the October 23, 1926 transfer into the Bass Lawton Post; the 1907 reunion parade photographs.
6. Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County, Col. Sion S. Bass (1954) — the post in the past tense.