Fort Wayne is the Summit City because the canal crested here.

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The explanation. ARCH: groundbreaking was at Fort Wayne “due to it being the highest point on the canal route and thus giving the town its nickname.” History Center historian Tom Castaldi: by 1843 the canal ran Lafayette–Toledo “with Fort Wayne resting on the highest elevation between the two. Eventually, it earned Fort Wayne the name of The Summit City.” The engineering underneath it, Fort Wayne sits on the canal's summit level, the Maumee–Wabash divide, fits the lock geography.

The coinage. No source found names a coiner, a date, or a single printed use from the 1840s. “The nickname dates from 1843” is asserted everywhere and documented nowhere, an open file (see Open Questions).

Sources: ARCH Heritage Trail, archfw.org; History Center Notes & Queries, historycenterfw.blogspot.com

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. Joseph River — 17 feet high and 230 feet across — down to the summit near present-day Rumsey and Wheeler streets, on Cityscapes historian Randy Hawfield's account. The link itself had been argued at the highest level: George Washington proposed joining the Maumee and the Wabash in the 1790s, and Samuel Hanna of Fort Wayne began lobbying the Indiana legislature for the canal in 1823. What none of that settles is the nickname's first appearance in print, which the research behind this record still has not pinned to a dated page. The file stays open rather than borrow a date.

Added source: Hawfield, “Cityscapes,” News-Sentinel, on the summit level and the St. Joseph feeder

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