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1823–1841 — Ewington, Hanna's additions, and the panic
The first buyers: The men who bought at the first sales were, in the main, the men of the preceding entries wearing their other hats. Alexander Ewing, the Irish immigrant who had first seen Fort Wayne in the column that broke the siege of 1812 and settled his family here in 1822, bought heavily at the first land sales — including the eighty acres west of the plat that became Ewington, the town's first westward addition, platted around his Washington House tavern at Barr and Columbia. His sons William G. and George W. Ewing turned the family entries, the fur trade and federal removal contracts into the largest independent trading house in the West; their land speculation in Chicago and St. Louis, the History Center says, "earned them millions," and their estates are accounted in the Wealth section. Samuel Hanna — canal commissioner from 1828, the state's land salesman and the town's merchant — bought as he sold, taking the Barr & McCorkle residue in 1838–1839 and laying out additions of his own. Allen Hamilton, clerk turned merchant turned banker, president of the Fort Wayne branch of the State Bank of Indiana from 1835, completed the circle in 1840 by sitting as a United States commissioner for the last cession: the man who lent on the land helped buy the last of it from its first owners.
The boom and the bust: The History Center's plat record states the shape of the market plainly: "Sales at the land office boomed, especially after 1835, when there was a surge in land values." The canal was the engine — construction money, state land sales and federal entries chasing the same sections, town lots in the new additions changing hands on the expectation of the 1843 completion. The Panic of 1837 broke the expectation nationally, and Indiana's version was the worst of it: the Mammoth Internal Improvement System's debts, the suspension of the state works in 1839, and the long workout of the 1840s, in which canal lands, town lots and farm entries alike went through sheriff's sales and tax sales into the hands of those with cash — a second consolidation, quieter than the first, that the county's deed books record parcel by parcel. The aggregate figures printed for Fort Wayne land-office receipts in secondary summaries could not be verified against the office's own record, and they are not repeated here.
Sources: The Story of Fort Wayne and the Wealth section — Alexander Ewing's 1823 purchases and Ewington; the Ewing brothers' speculation (History Center account); The History Center, "Plat: LD 18" — the post-1835 boom (quoted); Griswold (1917) and the Indiana internal-improvements record for the 1837–1841 collapse as state context.