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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 hand. Through the later nineteenth century, pioneer relics, Indian artifacts and military souvenirs accumulated in private hands and patriotic societies' cabinets; the Mary Penrose Wayne Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution preserved a small body of them, and from 1902 to 1926 the county's first museum was a single "Relic Room" at the Allen County Courthouse. Those relics — little more — were what the Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society held when it was founded in 1921. The habit never left: the History Center today holds, among its 32,000-odd artifacts, the rope and the hatchet of Sam McDonald's 1883 hanging, exhibited as relics of the county's punitive past — the cane impulse, institutionalized. The McDonald case itself is told in the Crime History section.
Sources: the Museums section of this history — the History Center, "About" (the DAR relics as the society's 1921 assets; the 1852 souvenir canes); ACGSI, 1920s timeline of Allen County (the courthouse Relic Room, 1902–1926); the Crime History section (the McDonald rope and hatchet at the History Center).