Sources for Fort Wayne History: Books, Archives and Newspapers

Griswold (ed.), Fort Wayne, Gateway of the West, 1802–1813 (1927)

The documents. Bert J. Griswold, editor, Fort Wayne, Gateway of the West, 1802–1813. Indiana Historical Collections, vol. 15. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1927. Not a narrative history but a documentary edition: the garrison orderly books and the Indian agency account books of the last American fort, printed from the originals.

What it proved here: the day-to-day texture of the 1812 siege and the agency years — who was ordered where, what the agency bought and from whom — comes from this volume, cross-checked against Ball State's independent orderly-book transcriptions. It is the nearest thing to a Fort Wayne archive in print for the years 1802–1813.

Fed:

1. The wars leg (the 1812 order of battle), the government leg (the agency and land-office years), the Story of Fort Wayne section.

Brice, History of Fort Wayne (1868)

The first city history. Wallace A. Brice, History of Fort Wayne, from the Earliest Known Accounts of This Point, to the Present Period. Fort Wayne: D. W. Jones & Son, 1868. Brice wrote within living memory of the canal era, and his book carries the long Samuel Hanna biography and the pioneer sketches every later writer mines.

What it proved here: Brice corroborates the fort commandant succession (Moore, Jenkinson, Whistler) independently of Griswold, and Griswold himself quotes Brice for the events of 1838–39 — which makes Brice the check on Griswold, not merely his source. Where the two agree against a modern summary, the agreement is printed.

Fed:

1. The government leg (commandants), the land leg, the Story of Fort Wayne section.

Indiana Gold Star Honor Roll (1921)

The state's roll of the dead. Gold Star Honor Roll: A Record of Indiana Men and Women Who Died in the World War. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Commission, 1921. Allen County's entries begin at page 18. Used here alongside ACGSI's county summary (over 100 Allen County dead) and Taylor's service records: three independent rolls, checked against each other name by name where the wars leg prints a name.

Fed:

1. The wars leg.

Charter and Revised Ordinances of the City of Fort Wayne (1887)

The city's own book. Charter and Revised Ordinances of the City of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Fort Wayne, 1887. Read first-hand in full text at the Internet Archive (charterrevisedor00fort). Its front matter carries the "Chronological Roster of Officers, 1840–1887," arranged by the city clerk, W. W. Rockhill — the city's own succession list, compiled by the office that kept the records.

What it proved here: the roster is the document that carried the city clerk succession back from 1888 to 1840 in one pass, and with the directory officer pages it fixed the comptroller's line 1894–1923 and bounded the office's later title change. When a modern list and Rockhill disagree, Rockhill is the one who was there.

Fed:

1. The government leg (clerk, comptroller and court successions).

Bates, The Water-Powered Mills of Allen County, Indiana (1942)

The mills, located. Roy Bates, The Water-Powered Mills of Allen County, Indiana, 1942. For years this study was cited locally as an undigitized manuscript; it is in fact digitized, and the business leg worked from the Internet Archive copy (waterpoweredmill00bate, the ACPL copy) — a correction this record prints because the earlier assumption had kept the mills out of reach.

What it proved here: Bates numbered and mapped the county's water-powered mills; six of his city mills anchor entries in the business record, each checked against the directory and newspaper trace. His remaining mills stand in the townships and are held with the county-scope question, except where Bates himself groups a mill with the city cluster.

Fed:

1. The business leg.

Slater-Putt, Beyond Books (1995)

The library's own history. Dawne Slater-Putt, Beyond Books: Allen County's Public Library History, 1895–1995. Fort Wayne: Allen County Public Library, 1995. Full text open at the Internet Archive. Chapter 4 holds an entry for every branch, and the narrative carries the directorship succession and the building campaigns entire.

What it proved here: the libraries leg is built on this book's spine — the 1895 founding, the Carnegie branches, the postwar building program — with each of its claims that we print checked forward against the library's own later record (the 2007 main library expansion, the branch renewals, the directors after 1995). It is also the model of what an institution's centennial history can be when the institution keeps its own records and lets its librarian write them.

Fed:

1. The libraries leg.

Poinsatte, Outpost in the Wilderness (1976)

The fort years. Charles R. Poinsatte, Outpost in the Wilderness: Fort Wayne, 1706–1828. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1976. The standard scholarly account of the French, British and American posts at the confluence.

What it proved here: Poinsatte is the land leg's measure of the portage (his seven miles stands in print beside the 1959 marker's eight and Croghan's nine — a family of measures, reconciled by the News-Sentinel's account of drought and flood carries, not averaged away), and the source of Little Turtle's "glorious gate" words in their Greenville-council context. Where Poinsatte and the orderly books differ, the orderly books govern.

Fed:

1. The land, before-the-city, government and spine legs.

Business history in print: Linkous, Nelson, Harter, Shideler

The company histories. The General Electric century in Fort Wayne rests on Linkous's General Electric of Fort Wayne, read through the News-Sentinel's account of it and through Scott M. Lindquist's "Electric Works" paper for the Quest Club (2023) — the club whose members' papers are a Fort Wayne institution in themselves. Don Nelson, The Zollner Piston Story (1995), is the piston works' own history. Randy Harter's Wayne Candies history (2017) and his Postcard History: Fort Wayne carry the candy trade and the photographic streetscape respectively. James Shideler's account of Fort Wayne's "pyramid banks" is the business leg's authority for the Depression-era banking oddity it names.

Fed:

1. The business and wealth legs.

Indiana Memory

The state's aggregated digital library. Indiana Memory gathers the digitized collections of the Indiana State Library, the Indiana Historical Society, the universities and the local societies into one searchable whole; a sample search returns 855 Fort Wayne results. The legs' prize from it is the John Tipton Collection: the Indian agent's own paper, including the receipt of 12 August 1823 for salt and the annuity receipt of 27 August 1824 — $18,400 in silver and 190 bushels of salt, signed by ten chiefs — the land transactions of the land leg, in the hand of the man who conducted them. Purdue Fort Wayne's digitization feeds Fort Wayne material into the same pool.

Fed:

1. The land, government and tribes legs.

SHAARD and the National Register files

The state's building-by-building record. The Indiana State Historic Architectural and Archaeological Research Database (SHAARD) and the National Register of Historic Places nomination files behind it: 83 Allen County listings at the time of the Architecture section's count, two of them National Historic Landmarks. A nomination is a researched mini-history — statement of significance, bibliography, building chronology — and the Architecture section treated the best of them as primary literature: the Richardville House nomination (the house under its Myaamia name, Akima Pinšiwa Awiiki), the Meshingomesia Cemetery and Indian School district nomination (which carries tribal history the county histories slight), and the courthouse file. ARCH, Fort Wayne's preservation organization, works from its street files to the same standard, with citations, in its Heritage Trail entries.

Fed:

1. The architecture, tribes and before-the-city legs.

Lindenwood Cemetery records

The city's roll of its dead. Lindenwood Cemetery, opened 1859, holds the records of more than 74,000 interments. For a history of a city, a great cemetery's register is a census of everyone the directories missed, and the people and wealth legs used it the way genealogists do: burial dates settle death dates, family lots settle kinship, and the cemetery's own Pioneers Resting in Historic Lindenwood (1989) is the biographical companion. The Catholic cemeteries' and the ACHS/ACGSI cemetery readings stand beside it in the same work.

Fed:

1. The people, wealth and folklore legs.

The Lincoln Collection at the ACPL

A national collection, kept in Fort Wayne. The Lincoln Financial Foundation's collection — formed from 1928 around the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company of Fort Wayne — was given in December 2008 to the people of Indiana, to be shared by the Indiana State Museum and the Allen County Public Library. The library's share came to Fort Wayne in 2009; the Rolland Center for Lincoln Research opened in the main library on 10 January 2022; and the collection's digitization runs on the Internet Archive, free to anyone. It is in this record for two reasons: it is one of the city's claims on the nation's history, and its presence explains the depth of the library that houses the Genealogy Center — Fort Wayne keeps other people's archives the way it keeps its own.

Fed:

1. The libraries and current legs.

The National Archives

The federal paper. The National Archives Catalog's Fort Wayne scans — treaty records, agency correspondence, the 1791 Harmar Court of Enquiry — are free and primary, and the introduction lists them. Two bodies of federal paper the legs did not exhaust are named here so the next researcher starts where we stopped: the Indian Agency records' year-by-year annuity totals for 1813–19 and 1825–28, which would let the land leg replace Rafert's summaries with the payments themselves; and the Archives' casualty files by home county, the named route to the Korean and Vietnam county death totals the wars leg could not responsibly print from any source it reached. Both are open work, stated as such in the legs' notes.

Fed:

1. The land, tribes, government and wars legs (and their stated gaps).

NCES Common Core of Data, and the Census

The counted present. The schools leg's Fort Wayne Community Schools figures — 28,549 students in 2024–25, 51 schools, a 13.40-to-1 student-teacher ratio, district ID 1803630 (IN-0235) — are the National Center for Education Statistics' Common Core of Data, the federal census of schools, not the district's publicity. The communities and current legs run on the Census Bureau's own products: QuickFacts for the city's headline numbers and the American Community Survey for the detail — including the figure that defines modern Fort Wayne's largest new community: 9,404 residents of Burmese ancestry in the metropolitan area in the ACS 2024, 2.1 percent of the metro and the highest Burmese share of any metropolitan area in the United States.

Fed:

1. The schools, communities and current legs.

The bank records: FRASER, the Comptroller, the FDIC

Charters and failures, from the regulators. The business leg's banking history rests on the Federal Reserve's FRASER archive (the Fed's own historical library: bank-status lists of 1935 and 1966 among them), the Comptroller of the Currency's Table 15 of national-bank charters, and the FDIC's branch and institution records — the Fort Wayne National Bank's charter at 110 West Berry, established 30 October 1933, is stated from the regulator's record, not from the bank's memory. One limit is stated in the leg's notes and repeated here: the FDIC's BankFind interface itself was not reachable through the routes available to this research session; the branch records used were reached through the FDIC's published data, and any charter detail a reader cannot reproduce should be checked in BankFind directly.

Fed:

1. The business leg.

The Journal Gazette

The surviving daily. The Journal Gazette is Fort Wayne's newspaper of record today, publishing daily behind a paywall; its archive is the paper's own, searchable by subscribers, with the deep backfile again on ACPL microfilm. This record uses it as the dated source for the modern city's turning points — the 2024 mayoral caucus and succession among them — and for the long view in its own pages: it was the Journal Gazette and the scholars writing from its files (the Indiana Magazine of History's 2017 study of editor Jesse Greene's anti-vice and anti-Klan campaigns) that documented the paper's own crusading century. Where a claim rests on a single Journal Gazette report, the report's date is printed with the claim.

Fed:

1. The government, current, communities and crime legs.