The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
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 authority. The city set its clocks forward on Saturday, 12 May 1917. Griswold's history treats the vote as what it amounted to, the city's adoption of Eastern time, and gives the reason of the season: the war gardeners, planting their lots after factory hours, wanted the evening hour of light, and the garden campaign hastened the change. The federal Standard Time Act followed on 19 March 1918, making daylight saving the law of the whole country; Congress repealed daylight saving in 1919, and the question of which hour Indiana should keep became one of the longest-running arguments in the state's public life. Its first page is that fourteen-to-one vote in the first spring of the Great War — a small city deciding for itself which side of the line it lived on, before there was a line in law.
Sources: the WWI Home Front section of this history — Griswold (1917), ch. L (the 1 May 1917 vote, the 12 May setting, the war-garden reason); Public Law 65-106 (Standard Time Act, 19 March 1918) and Public Law 66-40 (repeal of daylight saving, 20 August 1919), Statutes at Large.