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1823–1824 — the original plat, 118 lots over 109 acres
The buyers: The ground the town stands on was bought from the United States by John T. Barr of Baltimore and John McCorkle of Piqua, Ohio. The county histories name them, in John W. Dawson's phrase, the "original purchasers," and the History Center's record of the plat they laid out is this section's anchor: the Original Plat of 118 lots over 109 acres, bounded by present Barr and Washington and Superior streets and the alley between Calhoun and Harrison, its streets laid parallel to Columbia Street rather than to the compass. The plat was surveyed by Robert Young of Piqua — the 1889 Valley of the Upper Maumee history dates his survey to August 1822, while Dawson dates the laying-off to May 1824 and the plat was recorded on 20 May 1824, first in Randolph County at Winchester, Allen County's own records not yet existing. The two dates are carried here as the sources give them: a survey made in the district's first season, a plat perfected and recorded when the county was organized. No source reached states the price Barr and McCorkle paid the United States for the townsite tracts as a separate figure; the entries stand inside the land office's general run under the 1.25-dollar minimum.
The donation: What the proprietors gave back is recorded to the dollar. Griswold's history, in its notes on the county's first year, prints their 1824 proposition to the county commissioners: 500 dollars cash into the county treasury, the courthouse square — the block "stained red on the plat," bounded by Main, Court, Berry and Calhoun — granted as a public square for the county's buildings, and a lot four rods square at the plat's northwest corner for a church "of no particular denomination, but free to all," its unoccupied portion to serve as the town's burial ground. The county took the bargain; the courthouse square is the county's still. The proprietors worked through a local agent, Henry Rudisill, who came to Fort Wayne as Barr & McCorkle's representative and stayed to build the town's second gristmill.
The exit: Barr and McCorkle were absentee proprietors, and their Fort Wayne venture ended the way the record shows most of the first generation's ventures ending — consolidated into a resident's hands. In 1838–1839 Samuel Hanna, the canal commissioner and merchant, purchased all of the unsold and unappropriated Barr & McCorkle holdings, Judge Hanna by then holding, in the words of the graveyard account Griswold quotes, "all the Barr & McCorkle claims here." Hanna rearranged the donated church-and-burial lot into building lots and had the graves removed at the turn of the 1840s to the general cemetery — the ground that is now McCulloch Park. The townsite's chain of title thus runs: Miami nation, to the United States by Greenville and St. Mary's, to Barr and McCorkle at the land office, to Hanna — with the county's square and 500 dollars taken out along the way.
Sources: The History Center, "Plat: LD 18" (118 lots, 109 acres, the bounds, May 1824); Dawson, Charcoal Sketches (1872) — "original purchasers," the section description, the May 1824 laying-off; Valley of the Upper Maumee River (1889) — Young's survey dated August 1822, the recording; Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (1917), notes on Chapter XVII — the 1824 proposition, the $500, the courthouse square, the four-rod lot, and the Hanna purchase (quoting Brice's history); ACGSI, Rudisill places — Rudisill as Barr & McCorkle's representative; the Government section of this history — the sale of the fort-enclosure lands to Barr and McCorkle.