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1820s–1830 — the military reservation divided
The tract: Beside the proprietors' plat lay forty acres of military reservation, ground the Army had held with the fort. When the garrison era ended, Congress disposed of that forty in two halves, and Dawson's account of the division is the record: "The western twenty acres of the original forty acres, Military Reservation — which twenty acres the Congress of the United States authorized the Associate Judges of Allen County to enter for the county at $1.25 per acre — and the balance of the forty acres, set apart for Canal land, was bought and laid out into forty lots and called Taber's Addition."
The two halves: The county's twenty acres, entered at the statutory minimum — twenty-five dollars of county money for twenty acres in the middle of the town — became the County Addition, laid off in 1830. The canal twenty, bought from the state's canal lands and platted by Cyrus Taber in forty lots as Taber's Addition, put the canal grant's alternate sections into the town's street plan in miniature: state land, sold lot by lot, the proceeds pledged to the canal. Between Barr & McCorkle's plat, the county's addition and Taber's, the whole of the first town was assembled out of three different sellers — the United States, the county and the state — within seven years of the first land sale.
Sources: Dawson, Charcoal Sketches of Old Times in Fort Wayne (1872), Number IV — the forty acres, the $1.25 entry, the County Addition of 1830, Taber's Addition of forty lots (quoted).