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Every city keeps a stock of stories it tells about itself, and this section is where Fort Wayne's are brought in and checked against the record. Johnny Appleseed died in Fort Wayne: the Sentinel of 22 March 1845 records John Chapman's death here four days earlier, and his grave marker stands in the park that bears his name. Fort Wayne is the Summit City because the canal crested here, a claim the fieldstone Canal House of 1852 still stands to support. The 1913 flood killed seven people, or six: the section reads the count both ways and shows its work. Kekionga was a great capital whose name means blackberry patch, a translation the record treats more cautiously than the capital. Some stories told survive the checking and some do not; the section's rule is that the evidence, not the telling, gets the last word.
Sixteen famous Fort Wayne stories, each checked against the earliest record that survives.
Johnny Appleseed died in Fort Wayne and lies under the marker in Johnny Appleseed Park.
PEOPLE
More of the record around the marker. Chapman was born on 26 September 1774 at Leominster, Massachusetts. The Sentinel obituary the file above rests on is transcribed in full on the Genealogical Society's Appleseed page, where…
Fort Wayne is the Summit City because the canal crested here.
NAME
The engineering underneath the nickname, in numbers: the canal's summit level at Fort Wayne stood 198 feet above Lake Erie and 790 feet above sea level, and the feeder that supplied it ran some seven miles from a dam on the St.…
The 1913 flood killed seven people in Fort Wayne.” · “No, six.
FLOOD 1913
Two supports for reading the count this way. The Midwestern Regional Climate Center's community profile of the flood prints “6” under known fatalities — the drownings count, arrived at independently of the Sentinel's work. And…
Kekionga was a great capital · and its name means ‘blackberry patch.’
KEKIONGA
The name itself, in its Miami-Illinois form, is written kiihkayonki . Dunn, who handed the city the “blackberry patch” tradition, also floated the possibility that the name was a corrupted or dialect form of Kiskakon or Kikakon…
Anthony Wayne got ‘Mad Anthony’ from a jailed spy · or from Stony Point.
NAME
The trail in print, once someone went looking for it, is later and thinner than the legend suggests. Historian Michael J. F. Sheehan's study of the nickname traces the earliest Jemmy tale he could find to 1829, in the…
Little Turtle's grave was found on Lawton Place in 1912 · Washington's sword proved it.
PEOPLE
What became of the grave goods is a matter of fuller record than the identification itself. The National Park Service's 2016 notice under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Federal Register, 16 December…
The Woman in White haunted the Main Street bridge in 1883.
GHOSTS
The setting, for readers who know the modern city: in 1883 the Main Street bridge stood at the heart of the gaslit town, and the Gazette's three nights of coverage — 27, 28 and 29 August, page 7 each time — treated the…
The Embassy Theatre's ghost is stage manager Bud Berger.
GHOSTS
The theatre Berger is said to haunt opened on 14 May 1928 as the Emboyd, with the Indiana Hotel attached. His thirty years as stage manager, 1936 to his death in 1965, spanned the building's movie-palace maturity, and he lived on…
Fort Wayne was seventh on Hitler's bombing list.
WAR
The substrate deserves its own telling, because it is better than the myth. Camp Thomas A. Scott was built in August 1942 northeast of McMillen Park, between the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks and Moeller Road east of Wayne Trace…
Fort Wayne invented the refrigerator, in 1913.
INDUSTRY
There is a second Fort Wayne thread inside the legend, and it explains the date. The standard refrigerator histories credit Fred W. Wolf of Fort Wayne with the first home electric refrigerator of 1913 — the DOMELRE (DOMEstic…
Bowser invented the gasoline pump in 1885.
INDUSTRY
The dates around the claim, set out plainly: the 5 September 1885 sale was of a kerosene pump, and the sources checked for this record do not name the buyer, so the file prints the date without one rather than borrow a name.…
The Magnavox Odyssey was invented in Fort Wayne.
INDUSTRY
How the Fort Wayne part ran, on the sources cited above: Baer, an engineer at Sanders Associates in New Hampshire, had the “Brown Box” prototype built in 1966–67. Magnavox's management saw the system demonstrated at its Fort…
Fort Wayne hosted the first night baseball game, in 1883.
SPORT
The game that got there first, in full. On Thursday 2 September 1880 — three years before Fort Wayne's — the Northern Electric Light Company staged a demonstration at Nantasket Beach in Hull, Massachusetts, behind the Sea Foam…
Richardville was the richest man in Indiana · worth $23 million today · born under a miraculous apple tree.
PEOPLE
The man's outline, from the treaty record. Jean Baptiste de Richardville — Pinšiwa, “Wildcat” — was born about 1761 at Kekionga, son of Tacumwah, and became the Miami's last civil chief. He built his fortune with his mother on…
In 1982 the river crested at 26.93 feet, 30,000 volunteers saved the city, and Reagan named it ‘The City That Saved Itself.’
FLOOD 1982
The fight behind the numbers, so the split figures have their context. The rivers rose from the night of 12 March 1982; evacuations are counted at about 9,000 in most accounts and at 10,000 by 17 March in the Delaware case…
The Old Fort on Spy Run is Anthony Wayne's fort.
PLACES
Two further facts fix the site in the city's timeline. The reconstruction opened in the Bicentennial summer of 1976, less than a quarter-mile from the ground the real forts occupied. And the military story of that ground had…
The crest that won't sit still
Maumee River at Fort Wayne, feet. Solid bars: the National Weather Service historical-crest series. Outlined bars: the figures printed on the History Center's 1982 flood artifact label. One of the two series is measuring something different, the label does not say what. (“In 1982 the river crested at 26.93 feet, 30,000 volunteers saved the city, and Reagan named it ‘The City That Saved Itself.’”.)
NWS series via Around Fort Wayne / ACGSI floods page. Flood stage at Fort Wayne is 15 ft; both crests stand ~11 ft above it.