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22 October 1823 — the Fort Wayne Land District opens
The district: By act of Congress approved 8 May 1822, the lands ceded at St. Mary's were laid out as a federal land district with its office at Fort Wayne. Because the district was not yet surveyed, the offices stood vacant until 1823, when President Monroe appointed Samuel C. Vance register and Joseph Holman receiver. The office opened, in a room of the old fort, on 22 October 1823 — the day of the first land sale at Fort Wayne. The succession of registers and receivers that followed is a government record and is carried in the Government section; this section records what the office sold.
The terms and the first receipt: Sales ran under the Land Act of 1820: cash only, credit abolished, a minimum price of 1.25 dollars an acre and a minimum entry of eighty acres. The Allen County Genealogical Society's land-records page preserves the first transaction of the series: Receipt No. 1 went to William Willson of Middletown, Ohio, for 93.30 acres just east of Fort Wayne at the bend of the Maumee River. The full run of the office's business survives as a book — the Fort Wayne Land Office Entries, 1823 to 1852, held by the Indiana Archives and Records Administration — three decades of entries in which every farm in the county begins. Buyers entered land in person or by agent at the fort, paid the receiver, and took a receipt that became a patent when the paperwork cleared Washington; the gap between entry and patent, sometimes years, is written through the county's early deeds.
Sources: Act of 8 May 1822 (the Fort Wayne land district); Valley of the Upper Maumee River (1889), land-office chapter — creation, vacancy, appointments, the 22 October 1823 opening; Land Act of 1820 (the $1.25 minimum, eighty-acre minimum, cash terms); ACGSI, "Land Records in Allen County, Indiana" — Receipt No. 1 and the Fort Wayne Land Office Entries, 1823–1852 (Indiana Archives).