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Weird Facts · the strange-but-documented record
Every city accumulates a drawer of facts that sound invented. This section is Fort Wayne's drawer, opened and checked. Each entry below is a genuine oddity of the record — a locomotive that worked under another engine's number, a tax paid in wolf scalps, a mayoralty of eleven days — and each carries the source it stands on. Where an oddity is told in full elsewhere in this history, the entry here is short and points to its home section. Where a famous local oddity does not survive checking, it is entered anyway, as a claim, with the failure stated — that, too, is part of the record. Nothing in this section rests on an unsourced "did you know."
The locomotive that wore another engine's number
1963 · LAW DEPARTMENT OF SMALL DECEPTIONS, RAILROAD DIVISION
The swap: The steam locomotive Fort Wayne displays and steams as Nickel Plate Road No. 765 spent its first nine years of retirement as No. 767. When the city asked the railroad for a display engine for Lawton Park, it asked…
Paid in wolf scalps
1824–1908 · THE COUNTY'S FIRST CURRENCY
The tax: In Allen County's first years, a resident could pay his state taxes in wolf scalps. The county's early history, as reprinted in the Allen County genealogy record, sets out the first tax schedule after the county's…
The city that voted itself an hour east
1917 · BEFORE TIME ZONES WERE LAW
The vote: On 1 May 1917, ten months before Congress passed any standard-time law at all, the Fort Wayne common council voted fourteen to one to move the city's clocks an hour ahead — adopting, in effect, Eastern time on its own…
The first locomotive arrived by boat, in pieces
1854 · THE SUCCESSION, LITERAL
The delivery: Fort Wayne's railroad age began with an irony the record states plainly: the first locomotive to reach the city arrived not under steam but as freight. The Ohio and Indiana Railroad was completed to the south side…
The knife at the parley
5 SEPTEMBER 1812 · INSIDE THE FORT, UNDER A FLAG OF TRUCE
The scene: The strangest scene of the 1812 siege of Fort Wayne happened indoors, under a flag of truce, with wine on the table. Winamac, a Potawatomi chief who co-led with Five Medals the force of roughly five hundred Potawatomi…
Eleven days of Mayor Simon
8–20 JULY 1985 · THE SHORTEST MAYORALTY
The episode: On 8 July 1985 Mayor Winfield Moses Jr. resigned, having pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor violations of the campaign-finance laws arising from his re-election campaign. City Controller Cosette Simon succeeded as…
A bicycle club for a currency question
1896 · THE WHEEL AS A POLITICAL MACHINE
The club: In the presidential campaign of 1896 — the free-silver election, fought over the money question — Fort Wayne fielded a bicycle club for a monetary policy. The Sound Money Bicycle Club counted four hundred members, in…
Two hundred people saw the first game
4 MAY 1871 · PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL BEGINS, QUIETLY
The game: The first game of the first professional baseball league drew a crowd of a few hundred — contemporary estimates start at about two hundred — kept down by threatening weather, and it holds its "first" partly by accident…
Wilt's 3,000th point, in a borrowed home game
10 MARCH 1961 · THE MILESTONE HAPPENED HERE ANYWAY
The night: One of the landmark scoring nights in basketball history happened in Fort Wayne four years after Fort Wayne lost its team. The Fort Wayne Pistons had left for Detroit in 1957, but on 10 March 1961 the Detroit club…
Walking sticks made from the fort
1852 · THE CITY BEGINS KEEPING ITSELF
The relics: Fort Wayne began turning its history into souvenirs remarkably early. When the last building of the old fort was torn down in 1852, souvenir canes were made from some of its timbers — the city's past, carried in the…
Coolah, the last Tasmanian devil outside Australia
DIED 18 MAY 2004 · FRANKE PARK
The animal: For a time, the rarest address in the animal world was a zoo enclosure in Franke Park. The Fort Wayne Children's Zoo — opened 3 July 1965, renamed the Fort Wayne Zoo on 1 January 2025 — was home over the years to…
Five wildebeests on the streets
19 OCTOBER 2004 · AND AN ECHO IN 2026
The escape: Five months after Coolah's death, the zoo made national news of a different kind. On 19 October 2004, five wildebeests broke through a gate and jumped a fence and roamed the streets of a north-central Fort Wayne…
The five-hundred-dollar theatre
BOUGHT 2012 · REBORN 2018
The price: The Clyde Theatre opened on 19 April 1951 at 1808 Bluffton Road — the Quimby family's second great Fort Wayne room, designed by A. M. Strauss, with 1,782 seats, the region's premier movie house. It changed names…
The tallest sunflower in the world grew in a Fort Wayne backyard
MEASURED 3 SEPTEMBER 2025 · 35 FEET 9 INCHES
The flower: Guinness World Records' announcement of 10 September 2025 is plain about it: after ten years, the record for the tallest sunflower had fallen to "a monster bloom grown in the backyard of a family from Fort Wayne…
The world's largest guitar pedalboard, assembled at the Clyde
9 JULY 2019 · 319 PEDALS, NO DUPLICATES
The board: The Clyde's second life produced a world record within fourteen months of its reopening. On 9 July 2019, at Sweetwater's Clyde Theatre in Fort Wayne, the guitarist Rob Scallon and Sweetwater assembled and played the…
The world's largest high-heel race
11 SEPTEMBER 2010 · HEADWATERS PARK, 967 RUNNERS
The race: Guinness World Records' own record page reads: "The largest high heel race was achieved by 967 participants at an event organised by Women's Bureau, Inc. (USA) at Headwaters Park in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA, on 11…
The blizzard that bent the barometer
25–27 JANUARY 1978 · THE STORM THE RECORDS MEASURE BY
The pressure: The Blizzard of 1978 holds two of Fort Wayne's strangest weather distinctions at once. It was the storm of Indiana's first statewide Blizzard Warning in history, issued at 3:45 p.m. on 25 January 1978 — no such…
Thirty-eight coffins for Peru
MARCH 1913 · IN THE MIDDLE OF ITS OWN FLOOD
The order: The great flood of March 1913 put some 2,000 Fort Wayne homes under water; the Maumee crested at 26.1 feet on the night of 26 March, the dikes guarding Lakeside breached, martial law was declared, and the relief…
The night the sky broke — and the meteorite that isn't
26 NOVEMBER 1919 · AND A CHECKED NEGATIVE
The burst: Shortly before 8:00 p.m. on 26 November 1919, a brilliant meteor crossed far northern Indiana and southern Michigan, seen from Newberry in the Upper Peninsula to Milwaukee and Lucknow, Ontario. Its shock wave produced…
The first wrapped bread in Indiana
1923 · A KITCHEN-TABLE FIRST
The loaf: Not every Fort Wayne first is monumental; some are sliced. The Perfection bakery — the firm behind Perfection Wafers and, from 1946, the Sunbeam bread whose sign became a downtown landmark in 1957 — was, in 1923, the first bakery in Indiana to offer wrapped bread. The claim is the History Center's, carried in its virtual exhibit on the firm's shipping crate and entered in the Business section of this history. It is printed here because it is the kind of first that trivia lists usually steal without a source — and this one has one.
Sources: the Business section of this history — the History Center, virtual exhibit (Perfection Brand shipping crate): Perfection Wafers; first wrapped bread in Indiana, 1923; Sunbeam from 1946; the 1957 sign.
Told often, checked in the ledger
THE CLAIMS THIS SECTION DOES NOT RETELL
Four of Fort Wayne's most-repeated oddities are worked in full — telling, teller and record side by side — in the Stories Told section of this history, and are entered here in one line each so this drawer is complete: that Fort…