Timeline

The French built Fort St. Philippe des Miamis in 1722, a palisaded post garrisoned by as many as thirty men; General Wayne's men built the first Fort Wayne in the autumn of 1794, the post that gave the city its name.

In 1747 Huron warriors allied with the English under Chief Nicholas caught the first fort undermanned — the commandant, Ensign Douville, and most of the garrison away at Detroit — and sacked and burned it.

The actions, in order: June 1763 — Pontiac's War. Ensign Robert Holmes, the British officer at the small post among the Miami towns, was ambushed and killed with his party, and the post passed into Native hands — the only British-era action on this ground.

He emerges in 1764, in the aftermath of Pontiac's War, when his sparing of the captured British officer Thomas Morris — carried in the record as the act that made his name — set Kekionga's course of accommodation with the incoming British.

The man behind the legend: John Chapman was born on 26 September 1774 in Leominster, Massachusetts, and Fort Wayne makes no claim on his birth or his upbringing.

The young trader Henry Hay wintered at Kekionga in 1789–90 and kept the diary that remains the best everyday description of the town before the armies came: the councils, the dances, the comings and goings of traders and war parties at the gate.

Harmar marched from Fort Washington (Cincinnati) on 7 October 1790 with 320 regulars of the First American Regiment and 1,133 militia — the largest army the young United States had yet fielded.

Gen. Josiah Harmar's expedition is mauled in detachments by Little Turtle's forces, the disaster that opens the American record here.

Kekionga, the Miami capital at the head of the Maumee, was the town the young United States had to break before it could hold the Old Northwest, and in the autumn of 1790 President Washington sent the first of three armies to do it.

The city's Floods marker, standing at the confluence, reaches back to a significant flood in 1790 and states the system's first law: before dikes, the average flood level was about fourteen feet; as engineers diked the riverside neighborhoods, the same water, denied its floodplain, rose higher…

St. Clair's force wasted from about 2,000 men at its peak to some 920 officers and men present on the morning of 4 November 1791, camped unfortified on the upper Wabash.

Harmar's failure brought a bigger army with the same destination.

Marching north from Fort Washington in the autumn of 1791 with roughly 1,400 people — soldiers and a train of camp followers — St. Clair was under orders to build a post at Kekionga itself and hold it.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and, far more harshly, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (18 September 1850) put rendition in the hands of federal commissioners: a claimant's sworn affidavit sufficed, the accused could not testify, there was no jury, and aiding a fugitive exposed the helper to a $1,000 fine, six months'…

His chief of scouts was the man who knew Kekionga best — William Wells , called Apekonit (“Wild Carrot”) for his red hair, a Kentucky captive adopted into the Miami, Little Turtle's son-in-law, who had fought against the United States at St. Clair's defeat before changing sides in 1794 and bringing Wayne the…

On 22 October 1794 Col. Jean François Hamtramck dedicates and names Fort Wayne , fifteen cannon rounds for fifteen states, on the fourth anniversary of Harmar's Defeat.

The Legion of the United States trained at Legionville and Pittsburgh, moved north behind a chain of new forts in 1793 — recovering, on the way, the very ground of St. Clair's defeat, where it built Fort Recovery — and advanced down the Maumee in the summer of 1794.

General Anthony Wayne's Legion reached Kekionga on 17 September 1794, and Wayne personally selected the site near the present intersection of Berry and Clay streets.

The presence precedes the town: Dodie Marie Miller's African Americans in Fort Wayne: The First 200 Years , the community's own published history, begins its story in 1794, the year of the American fort, on evidence pointing to a Black inhabitant from the start.

What he did here: After the United States Army's two defeats at the hands of the Miami Confederacy, President Washington gave Wayne the Legion of the United States, and on 20 August 1794 Wayne won the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near the Maumee Rapids in Ohio, the victory that broke the Confederacy's war.

The Treaty of Greenville, signed 3 August 1795 after Wayne's victory at Fallen Timbers, is usually told as an American instrument; from the council side it was the confederacy's reckoning with a war it could no longer feed.

Visit Fort Wayne's history page dates the treaty “August 10, 1795.” The treaty text says 3 August , a small, checkable error in a secondary source, and exactly the kind this record exists to catch.

Richardville, a young chief in 1795, signed for the Miami. The six miles square was not sold by metes and bounds again for a generation; it sat in the record as "the reserve at Fort Wayne," and the 1818 treaty boundary would be drawn around its lines.

On his visit to President Washington at Philadelphia in 1797, Little Turtle sat, at Washington's arrangement, to Gilbert Stuart, the painter of Washington's own portraits.

A replacement American fort rose in 1800, and after the War of 1812 Major John Whistler — grandfather of the painter — oversaw construction of the third and last in 1815–16: an all-wood post designed so that a garrison of only 50–75 men could hold it, remembered by its restorers as the most sophisticated wooden fort…

The spine of this era is a paper trail, and much of it survives: the Indian Agency's letter book for 1809–1815, transcribed by Gayle Thornbrough for the Indiana Historical Society in 1961, and Bert Griswold's Fort Wayne, Gateway of the West, 1802–1813 (1927), which prints the garrison orderly books and the agency's account book.

It is the opening move of Harrison's treaty system — between 1803 and 1809 he would conclude eleven treaties transferring roughly 30 million acres — and Fort Wayne, seat of the agency and of Wells's interpretership, was one of its regular council grounds.

The transaction: The first treaty that bears this place's name was concluded at the fort on 7 June 1803, between Governor William Henry Harrison and the Delaware, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Eel River, Wea, Kickapoo, Piankashaw and Kaskaskia.

The Fort Wayne treaties of 1803 and 1809 — the second of them Governor Harrison's great purchase, signed at Fort Wayne and Vincennes, which took some three million acres of the Wabash and White River country…

Nearly 1,400 Delaware, Miami, Potawatomi and Eel River people attended the council at the fort in late September 1809.

In late September 1809 nearly 1,400 Delaware, Miami, Potawatomi and Eel River people attended a council at the fort, where Governor William Henry Harrison of Indiana Territory pressed for a cession along the Wabash.

The transaction: Harrison came back to Fort Wayne in September 1809 and took the largest cession yet from the Miami, Eel River, Delaware and Potawatomi.

Treaty of Fort Wayne (1809); St. Mary's (1818, creating the Big Miami Reserve); Mississinewas (1826, canal right-of-way); Forks of the Wabash (1838, 1840).

James H. Madison's Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana concludes the bison "likely present in every part of Indiana" but concentrated across the southwest, along the Illinois prairie edge and the Buffalo Trace; Hornaday's Smithsonian extermination map, as the Cornell collection describes it, dates Indiana's bison to 1810.

On 15 August 1812, a mile and a half from the fort, Potawatomi warriors ambushed the column.

Some 500 Potawatomi and Miami besiege a garrison of about 100 until William Henry Harrison relieves it on 12 September.

General Hull surrendered Detroit on 16 August 1812; the Fort Dearborn garrison, evacuating under orders, was destroyed the day William Wells — the fort's own scout turned Indian agent's nephew by capture and adoption — was killed trying to shepherd it out.

Three rivers meant the town was always building bridges: The earliest picture of a Fort Wayne bridge is a woodcut: the state historic bridge survey, quoting Lossing's Pictorial Field-Book of the War of 1812 , describes "the wooden timber trestle and kingpost bridge across the Maumee directly below the confluence,"…

The scene: The strangest scene of the 1812 siege of Fort Wayne happened indoors, under a flag of truce, with wine on the table.

Crail and Grabarkiewicz's Guide to the Common Fishes of the Toledo Area (2008) records that soldiers stationed at Fort Meigs during the War of 1812 "reported numbers of walleye and sturgeon so thick that thousands could be harvested in a day with a spear or simple fishing pole," and that gristmill dam owners on the…

Little Turtle died on July 14, 1812, and was buried in a family burial ground near Spy Run Creek. The grave was unmarked, and within a few generations the city had forgotten where it lay.

Pinšiwa — Jean Baptiste de Richardville, born about 1761 at Kekionga, son of the French trader Antoine-Joseph Drouet de Richerville and Tacumwah, Pacanne's sister…

Founded: Francis Comparet came up the Maumee to Fort Wayne in 1818 as a fur trader and built one of the town's first permanent trading establishments: a brick residence with an adjoining store and trading house on Columbia Street, standing by 1830, and later a warehouse on the canal basin.

Fort Wayne's business record opens with a fur trader: Francis Comparet came up the Maumee to Fort Wayne in 1818 and built one of the town's first permanent trading establishments…

The 1818 grants: Article 3 of St. Mary's granted Jean Baptiste Richardville, by patent in fee simple, a schedule of tracts that the Park Service's nomination totals at eleven sections — 7,040 acres.

The 1834 treaty, commuting older grants, recites four sections on the Salamonie granted him at St. Mary's in 1818; the 1826 schedule gave him a section on the north side of the Wabash above Richardville's spring tract, with his brother Louison's section above that and Francis Lafontaine's above Louison's…

The Army withdraws in 1819; a federal land office follows. The town is platted in 1823 , Allen County is organized in 1824 , Fort Wayne incorporates as a town in 1829 (population ~300) and as a city on 22 February 1840 (population over 2,000).

Founded: May 29, 1820, by the Rev. Isaac McCoy, a Baptist missionary, who opened a school inside the decommissioned Fort Wayne at the urging of the Miami chief Jean Baptiste de Richardville.

The Political Graveyard's roster of the office opens with Benjamin B. Kercheval in 1820, followed by Samuel Hanna, 1820–25.

Chicago, 29 August 1821: The Treaty of Chicago took from the Ottawa, Chippewa and Potawatomi a great tract in present Michigan, its southern line running to the Indiana boundary country west of this county.

Alexander Ewing , an Irish immigrant who had first seen Fort Wayne in 1812, in the column that broke the siege, settled his family here in 1822, kept the Washington House tavern at Barr and Columbia, and bought heavily at the first land sales…

The Allen County Genealogical Society's Wayne Township church survey, drawing on the congregation's own record, states that the first assembly of any faith in the Fort Wayne area was organized by the Rev. Isaac McCoy, the Baptist missionary to the Indians: the church was formally organized with eleven charter members…

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.

Founded: 1823 per the Barr-and-Columbia marker inscription ("North East — Suttenfield Tavern 1823") — The firm record underneath it: the first tavern licence in organised Allen County was granted to William Suttonfield on 10 August 1824 (fee $12.50, circuit court having acted on the application)…

A lodge older than the county: On March 22, 1823, John Sheets, Grand Master of Masons in Indiana, granted a dispensation to Alexander Ewing, John P. Hedges and Benjamin Cushman, and others, to form a lodge at Fort Wayne.

The town's first businesses were kept by men the record mostly knows by a licence or a single account: William Suttenfield held one of the first tavern licences — the Barr-and-Columbia marker dates the Suttenfield Tavern 1823.

The act for the formation of Allen County, approved December 17, 1823, named five commissioners "to determine and locate the seat of justice" — Lot Bloomfield and Caleb Lewis of Wayne County, Abiathar Hathaway of Fayette County, William Conner of Hamilton County, and James M. Ray of Marion County…

Licensed from the start: The first tavern licenses in Allen County were granted on August 10, 1824, to William Suttenfield and Alexander Ewing, each paying $12.50 for the privilege, their houses standing on opposite corners of Barr and Columbia streets — Ewing's house was called Washington Hall.

Lodging is the town's first licensed business: On August 10, 1824 — months after the townsite was platted — the first tavern licenses in Fort Wayne were granted, to William Suttonfield and to Alexander Ewing, each on payment of $12.50, the Circuit Court having acted on the applications first.

The county's early history, as reprinted in the Allen County genealogy record, describes the first tax years after the county's organization in 1824 — fifty cents on every male over twenty-one, thirty-seven and a half cents on a horse — and then states: "The State taxes were generally paid in wolf scalps, on which a bounty was allowed."

Allen Hamilton, an Irish immigrant trader, was commissioned sheriff on 2 April 1824 by Governor William Hendricks, to serve until the people could elect one; he conducted the county's first election on 22 May 1824 and was paid twenty dollars for his first six months.

Allen County was organized in 1824, and its first court business was the ordinary business of a frontier county: debts, assaults, stray livestock, and theft.

The county's early history, as reprinted in the Allen County genealogy record, sets out the first tax schedule after the county's organization in 1824 — fifty cents on every male over twenty-one, thirty-seven and a half cents on a horse…

Founded: 1825, when Allen County built its first schoolhouse — a brick building, standing behind the site of the later county jail, and remembered in the Griswold-Phelps Handbook of 1913–14 as the first brick schoolhouse in Fort Wayne.

The act of 2 March 1827 made the state a proprietor.

The house as museum: The house Jean Baptiste de Richardville built in 1827 at 5705 Bluffton Road — subsidized by the United States under the 1826 Treaty of Mississinewa, and described by the History Center as the oldest Native American building in the Midwest and the only surviving treaty house in the nation…

Founded: The Indiana State Library's finding aid for the George W. Ewing letters states plainly that G.W. Ewing "founded the firm W.G. and G.W. Ewing with his brother William in 1827."

Founded: Completed August 1827. Roy M. Bates's specialist study The Water-Powered Mills of Allen County, Indiana (Feb 1942, Allen County Public Library) states plainly: "The first water-powered mill erected in Allen County was completed in August, 1827, by James Barnett and Samuel Hanna."

Founded: Two independent News-Sentinel accounts agree: the city history ("Absalom Holcomb and Isaac Marquis opened a tannery a year later [than the 1827 gristmill] at the west end of Columbia Street") and Michael Hawfield's Cityscapes history of the Randall Hotel ("The Randall Hotel began in 1828 as a tannery.

Founded: 1828 for both — single-source, thin. The only mention found for either business, after targeted searching, is one sentence-pair in the News-Sentinel city history: "Madore Truckery opened his cooper shop that year [1828, the year after the gristmill passage].

The Indiana United Methodist Conference's heritage record and the congregation's historical marker agree: Methodism in the Fort Wayne area was organized as a mission in 1828.

From hides to guests: The Randall's building began in 1828 as a tannery at the foot of Columbia Street — built, in Michael Hawfield's account, by Absalom Halcomb and Isaac Marquis, its basement vats soaking hides in urine and oak bark; the genealogical society's timeline names the 1828 tannery on the site as Jacob Fry's.

The city Flood Control Department keeps a Chronological List of Floods running back to January 1828 . FEMA names the four greatest Fort Wayne floods of the modern record: 1913, 1978, 1982 and 1985 .

The earliest fully narrated passage of freedom seekers through Fort Wayne comes down in a single document: a manuscript written in the biblical cadence of the Society of Friends by Frederick Hoover , a Quaker of the Richmond settlement in Wayne County, Indiana, dated 1829 and preserved, in Griswold's day, by Hoover's…

Under a state act of January 1829 authorizing incorporation on a two-thirds vote of the citizens, Fort Wayne voted on 7 September 1829 to incorporate as a town — the vote certified to the board of county commissioners by William N. Hood, president of the meeting, and John P. Hedges, its clerk.

In 1830 and 1831 he represented twenty Myaamia people, most likely the inhabitants of his village, in the annuity collections; in the treaties of 1834 and 1838 he received two reserves along the Aboite, across the river from White Raccoon's village, between Huntington and Fort Wayne.

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.

In 1830 Henry Rudisill built the town's first gristmill on the St. Joseph, at a point Griswold's township history describes as chosen for "special facilities for building the dam" — the right bank of the St. Joseph…

The whole table: Allen County enters the census in 1830, six years after its organization; the town of Fort Wayne was not separately returned until 1850, the first census after its incorporation as a city in 1840, so the city series opens then.

Allen County went from 996 people in 1830 to 29,328 in 1860 — a twenty-nine-fold increase in thirty years — as the land sales, the Wabash and Erie Canal (reached Fort Wayne in the 1830s and completed through to Toledo in 1843) and the first farms pulled settlers into the Maumee valley.

Founded: In the autumn of 1830 Henry Rudisill and Henry Johns erected a flouring mill on the right (west) bank of the St. Joseph River, in the southwest quarter of Section 36, Washington Township…

In 1830 the Miami leader Big Leg — Neewilenkwanka — stood trial in the county's early court, a case the Crime addendum carries.

On 1 July 1831, under a rude shelter of boards near today's Columbia and Harrison streets, Chute organized the First Presbyterian Church of Fort Wayne.

Father Stephen Badin — the first priest ordained in the United States — was placed in charge of the Potawatomi mission in Indiana in 1830, and the diocesan history records that he presided at the first Catholic baptism of record in Fort Wayne in 1831 and later at the first Catholic marriage of record.

The engineering fell to a 24-year-old North Carolinian, Jesse Lynch Williams , named chief engineer of the canal in 1832 and within five years engineer of all Indiana's public works.

The canal began here, and the date was chosen twice over: 22 February 1832 was Washington's birthday, and it also beat a federal land-grant deadline falling in early March.

The dam, begun in 1832 and finished only in 1834 against repeated flood delays, was built of trees, sand, boulders, and gravel — 17 feet high and 230 feet across the river, at a recorded cost of $15,397 — impounding a lake to feed the summit.

The Wabash and Erie Canal, ground for which was broken at Fort Wayne in February 1832, made the city the summit level of a waterway that climbed from Toledo on Lake Erie to the head of the Maumee and descended the Wabash valley toward the Ohio.

The canal: The Wabash and Erie Canal was the machine built to abolish the portage in the first article of this section, and it was begun at Fort Wayne: ground was broken on 22 February 1832 where the St. Joseph feeder canal was to meet the main channel.

The petition: The first step toward a fire department in Fort Wayne was taken on 1 March 1833, when fifteen citizens — James Barnett, Samuel Edsall, William N. Hood, Dr. L. G. Thompson, Henry Rudisill, James Daniels, Joseph Morgan, David Rankin, John Forsythe, William H. Henderson, Zenas Henderson, J. B. Bequette, W.…

Hugh McCulloch settled here in 1833, practised law, and from 1835 ran the Fort Wayne branch of the State Bank of Indiana; three decades later he was Abraham Lincoln's Comptroller of the Currency and then, from March 1865, Secretary of the Treasury…

Fort Wayne's first newspaper, founded 6 July 1833 by Thomas Tigar and Samuel V. B. Noel with $500 in promised local backing; weekly at first, daily from January 1861; carried through the Times and Sentinel and The Democrat names and back to Sentinel in 1873…

1834: At the Forks of the Wabash — Richardville's own seat, at present Huntington — Commissioner William Marshall bought back the tribal reserves the 1826 treaty had created eight years before: thirty-six sections at Flat Belly's village; the five-mile reserve on the Wabash, about 23,000 acres, running back to Eel River…

The first night watch, 1834: In June 1834 the town trustees ordained a watch of "at least four judicious men," to guard the town "from the ravages of fire and to prevent disorderly conduct within said corporation" — the fire watch and the police watch were the same four men.

The History Center's own history site, in “The Fighting Irish: Canal Builders and the Violence of Progress” (drawing on Tom Castaldi's work, 2002), gives the Fort Wayne climax its date: “On July 10, 1835, armed and angry workers from both factions were prepared to meet in battle, to settle their differences.”

A wheat field without a road is a pantry; with one, it is a business: The first section of the Wabash and Erie Canal, from Fort Wayne to Huntington, opened on 4 July 1835, and through traffic followed as the Ohio works were finished.

The first section out of Fort Wayne, to Huntington, opened in the first days of July 1835 (the public library's canal history gives 4 July; other summaries give 3 July), and boatbuilding started with the traffic: the first boat constructed at Fort Wayne was the Indiana , built in 1834 by F. P. Tinkham.

Founded: 25 August 1835 — The date 25 August 1835 is the History Center's date, quoted on the ACGSI timeline; the year 1835 is agreed by every record-based source in hand, but no contemporaneous primary record for the 25 August date was quoted in hand, so the exact day rests on the accounts cited.

The State Bank of Indiana — the parent bank's bill drafted by Samuel Hanna and enacted 28 January 1834 — opened its Fort Wayne branch on 25 August 1835, with Allen Hamilton as branch president and Hugh McCulloch, a young lawyer with no banking experience, as cashier from October 1835.

The American House — John Spencer erected the building in 1836 on the northeast corner of the public square, kept first by Amos Compton and then by E. Palmer — was enough of a civic room that the citizens held their meeting for a daily mail line there on September 2, 1843.

Horace Rockwell was the first known traveling artist to visit the town and make a living in it, and the History Center's judgment is plainer than that: he settled in Fort Wayne in 1836 and is considered the city's first professional painter.

In 1837 Samuel Hanna — the town's leading pioneer, and, fittingly, a founder of the farmers' Agricultural Society four years later — donated land on Barr Street to the town for a public market, designated for that use in perpetuity; the street itself carried the name of John T. Barr, co-purchaser of the original town plat.

Indiana's Hoosier Homestead Award, created in 1976, recognizes farms held by one family for a century or more — Centennial at 100 years, Sesquicentennial at 150, Bicentennial at 200, on more than twenty acres…

The founding: On 14 October 1837, twenty-three heads of families met in the Allen County courthouse to adopt a "Formula for the Discipline of the Evangelical Lutheran Church" and organize the congregation long known as the First Evangelical Lutheran Church of Fort Wayne — today's St. Paul's, at Barr and East Lewis streets.

Founded: 1837 — The marker, the History Center's Castaldi account and the ACGSI/Griswold account all agree that Samuel Hanna donated land to the city in 1837 for a public market, and that a small frame market house was built within six months, patterned on the Philadelphia market, with stalls rented at $5 a year.

Founded: October 14, 1837, with St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran congregation itself, organized that day in the Allen County Courthouse by the Rev. Jesse Hoover — the congregational history counts 23 heads of families at the organizing; the historical marker on the site counts 24 families.

The firm is documented once, by an eyewitness: John W. Dawson, who arrived in Fort Wayne on 6 March 1838, describing the town as he saw it that year in his Charcoal Sketches (Fort Wayne Daily Sentinel, 15 March 1872).

Like Paige & Fry, the firm is documented once, in John W. Dawson's eyewitness description of Fort Wayne in 1838: "Captain Bourie and John B. Peltier had a fine store northwest of Calhoun and Columbia streets; Taylor, Freeman & Company, another on the northwest corner; Captain Ben Smith, a grocery, as then called…

In September 1838 Alexander T. Rankin was one of the organizers of the Indiana Antislavery Society ; the National Register nomination for his house records that he is the only recorded individual who participated in the organization of antislavery societies in both Ohio and Indiana, that he organized abolition…

The treaties of 1838 and 1840 excepted named families and their patented reserves from the general removal: the Richardville family, holding its Allen County and Forks reserves; the family of Francis Godfroy…

In 1839 he sent the Rev. Benjamin Hutchins of Philadelphia, and Christ Episcopal Church was formally established on 26 May 1839 — but the parish folded in less than a year when Hutchins departed.

The original company was reorganized there; its 1839 membership roll reads like the town's directory of leading men — Francis Comparet, Hugh McCulloch, Samuel Hanna, William Rockhill, Thomas Hamilton, Samuel Edsall, Robert Brackenridge Jr. and some fifty more.

The first houses: The service's first home was the wooden fire house of 1839 on William G. Ewing's lot at Clinton and Main, replaced in 1845–46 by the $337.78 engine house on city property.

The Treaty of the Forks of the Wabash, signed 28 November 1840, closed the tribal estate in Indiana: the Miami ceded the Big Reserve, the last tribal land in the state, in exchange for land west of the Mississippi and $550,000 in payments and provisions, and agreed to remove within five years.

The city's Whig newspaper, founded in 1840 by George W. Wood, Fort Wayne's first mayor — a surviving issue of 29 August 1840 settles the founding year against a later 1841 claim; edited by John W. Dawson from September 1853; the separate Times title ended in 1866, its lineage running into the Sentinel line.

The city's whole demographic story in one entry, from the federal censuses: 2,080 in 1840 (cityhood); 4,282 in 1850; 10,388 in 1860; 17,718 in 1870; 26,880 in 1880; 35,393 in 1890; 45,115 in 1900; 63,933 in 1910; 86,549 in 1920; 114,946 in 1930 — the Depression decade then nearly stops the clock: 118,410 in 1940…

The desk and its keepers: The city clerk's office began in 1840 as the recorder's desk, and its first holder, Franklin P. Randall, set the office's character: he was the man who wrote things down — the charter, the ordinances, the roster itself.

It was named for Colonel John… The mayors' table in the original section is the spine of this office — thirty-seven people across 1840 to today — and two changes in its shape are worth recording.

In the spring of 1841 Fort Wayne's farmers were called to the Court House — Saturday, May 29, Elias Waters in the chair — to organize an Agricultural Society; the call's own announcement invited all who felt "an interest in the advancement of that noble science."

Toohpia — Francis LaFontaine, "Frost on Leaves," born about 1810 near Fort Wayne (one county history says 1820; the weight of the record supports c. 1810), of a French father and a Miami mother, chief of his own village at eighteen and married to Richardville's youngest daughter Catherine…

Founded: William Robinson commenced work in 1841 on a factory for the manufacture of doors, window sash and other wood products, completing the building in 1842.

In 1842 and 1843 Rockhill and his partner Samuel Edsall erected two sawmills on those rights.

Founded: Construction began in 1842 and the mill was completed and put into operation in 1843 by Allen Hamilton and Jesse L. Williams.

Through navigation, Toledo to Lafayette by way of Fort Wayne, celebrated with Lewis Cass speaking, the Wabash & Erie at its summit.

From the canal to the limestone plant at the confluence: For its first decades Fort Wayne drank from where it stood: the rivers themselves, the canal (a recorded supply from 1843 into the 1870s), ponds, creeks, cisterns, and wells.

Fort Wayne Lodge No. 14 took its charter on October 14, 1843, and was instituted on October 27 by Deputy Grand Master John Green; James P. Munson was its first Noble Grand.

A new trade arrives with the canal: Bert J. Griswold's Pictorial History records that the daguerreotype was introduced into Fort Wayne in 1843, the year the Wabash and Erie Canal reached the city.

Gathering ground at Swinney's from the canal celebration of 1843; a county fair established there in the [1847-1874] bracket, racing and exhibiting in September for many years, on land the city would take as a park.

Course: Thomas W. Swinney's 1844 homestead at 1424 West Jefferson Boulevard was the Historical Society's home for its first museum era: the society occupied the house from 1924 (the family's occupancy ended in 1922, when the last daughter's death brought the house and park to the city under Swinney's will) and opened…

Chapman had worked the Maumee valley for years, planting his fenced nurseries of apple seedlings ahead of the settlers — including ground in this county — and he died at the cabin of William Worth, northeast of the town, in March 1845…

Through the summer of 1846 the emigration agents — the contractors were the trading firms of the Ewing interest and Alexis Coquillard of South Bend — gathered the people at a camp at Peru, on the straight reach of the Wabash the Miami called Iihkipihsinonki, "the Straight Place"…

Five boats to Cincinnati, a steamboat to Kansas; the party reaches Sugar Creek on 5 November 1846, and several die on the way.

6–7 OCT 1846 FORT WAYNE / KIIHKAYONKI · PERU Hundreds of Myaamia are loaded onto canal boats at Peru and at Fort Wayne for Kansas.

In September 1846 the United States Army rounded up the remaining Miami — about 500 people gathered at Peru by the older accounts, 327 of them removed by the tribally sourced count in the Tribes section — and held them at Peru, on the Wabash, for embarkation.

The separation was made, in the words of Slocum and Robertson's History of the Maumee River Basin , "with the mutual consent of all concerned": preliminary steps were taken on 22 March 1846, and a constitution was adopted on 19 April 1846, with seventeen charter members, not a few of them founders of the 1837 church.

The school held its first formal classes in October 1846, on the second floor of Pastor Sihler's parsonage next door to St. Paul's, with Sihler as its first president.

On 1 June 1846 they marched in procession to the lower lock and left by canal — by the Miami Canal to Cincinnati, then on to New Albany — and on 20 June 1846 they were mustered in as Companies E and F of the 1st Indiana Volunteers, Colonel James P. Drake commanding.

Wilhelm Loehe of Neuendettelsau, Germany, sent eleven students and an instructor, who arrived in August 1846; classes began that October in the home of Pastor Wilhelm Sihler of St. Paul's, the seminary's first president (1846–1861).

There the tribal government that removal had carried out of Indiana in the canal boats continues unbroken: the United States has recognised the western tribal government continuously since 1846, and the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma today is that government…

Founded: 1846, by the North Indiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. (The year 1851 sometimes attached to the college is the date of its surviving catalogue.)

Founded: 1846, on the northwest corner of Cathedral Square, under Mother Theodore Guérin and the Sisters of Providence, who had arrived in August 1845 to take charge of the girls of the first Catholic school (second rung).

The oldest complete export ledger the city has: The canal history preserves, in full, the list of articles and amounts of produce handled at the Fort Wayne station during the year 1848, and it is the single best document of what this country sent out in the canal age.

On 13 October 1848 a society of twenty-three members — organized as a "Society for Visiting the Sick and Burying the Dead," with Frederick Nirdlinger as president and Redelsheimer as vice-president — bought for 200 dollars the old burial ground adjoining what is now McCulloch Park.

In 1848 thirty German families bought lots at the present corner of Lafayette Street and Jefferson Boulevard for 1,700 dollars — five of the chartering families mortgaged their farms for the endeavour…

The earliest documented church organ in the city is the small four-stop instrument owned by Trinity Episcopal Church in 1848 and installed in its first building at Berry and Harrison streets.

Gideon Webster Seavey was born in Lee County, Illinois, on 14 February 1848, and headed the Seavey Hardware Company of Fort Wayne until his death on 13 March 1893 — by then, in the words of his Griswold biographical sketch, "one of the oldest and largest hardware establishments of northern Indiana."

On the Catholic side, St. Augustine's (1836) played the mother-parish role: St. Mary Mother of God was cut from it in 1848 for German speakers, and the diocese built out a city of territorial and national parishes, each with its school — the parish-school system is treated in the Schools section.

On January 11, 1849, the council reappointed its board of health — Drs. H. Wehmer, H. P. Ayres and C. E. Sturgis — "especially in view of the approaching cholera."

In 1849 the trustees purchased a lot on the south side of Jefferson Street between Hanna and Francis — and could not build on it.

In 1849 the society circulated William W. Findlay's printed appeal "To the Colored People of Indiana," written by a Black emigrant who had resolved to go, inviting others to join him…

Turner Chapel, the city's first Black congregation, was organized in 1849 — its trustees bought a lot that year on Jefferson Street between Hanna and Francis, though Indiana's Black Laws of 1851 kept them from building for nearly twenty years…

The census counted Black Fort Wayne from the beginning, and counted it small: In 1850 the federal census found 81 free "colored" people in the city of Fort Wayne and 102 in all of Allen County — 1.9 percent of the city, 0.6 percent of the county — in a state whose 1851 constitution would attempt to bar Black settlement altogether.

From Buffalo to the Phoenix Block: Archibald McDonald worked in Buffalo, New York, in 1848 under his family name, McDonnell, and moved to Fort Wayne in December 1850, opening a studio above B. Mason's store.

The directory record names the others: a Mrs. Caldwell, billed with her husband as "Mr. Caldwell and Lady," who took Dexter Andrews's rooms on Columbia Street in November 1850; Jessie Aufrecht, who kept a studio with her husband Gustave at 60 Calhoun in 1880–81…

After 1840, Allen County contained no tribal land except the patented individual reserves — and those, excepting the exempted families Congress protected in 1850, passed into the market by sale across the following generation, litigated as late as 1886 in the Richardville tax case.

In 1850 the census found 81 free Black residents in the city and 102 in the county. Exclusion cut the county's count by 35 percent by 1860 and to under fifty by 1870.

On 4 August 1851 Indiana's voters decided two questions: whether to adopt the new state constitution, and — submitted separately, so that no man's vote for the constitution need be read as his vote on this…

Fort Wayne Chapter No. 19, Royal Arch Masons, was chartered May 24, 1851.

The count falling: On 4 August 1851 Indiana's voters wrote exclusion into the state constitution — Article XIII, barring Black settlement outright — and Allen County approved it 1,803 to 261, as Griswold prints the return…

The system: Marmaduke Marcelus Michael Slattery was born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1851, took his B.A. at Marlborough College in 1873, came to the United States in January 1880, worked in the engineering department of the United States Electric Lighting Company in New York, and helped organize the Sun Electric Company…

The first stood where the two transport ages met: a frame depot and engine house at the canal basin, at the northwest corner of Lafayette and Columbia streets, at the end of the track that ran down the middle of Lafayette Street…

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 history was already an object to be kept and carried.

One sitting, one irreplaceable image: Charles C. Stevens, advertising as "C. C. Stevens and Brother" from June to November 1852 in rooms at the home of John Fairfield on Main Street, made the only known image of the last blockhouse of the 1816 fort before it was demolished…

Course: The Fort Wayne Gas Light Company was franchised in 1853 and incorporated in 1855 to light private residences; it won the street-lighting contract in 1857.

Founded: The firm's own history, printed in 1919 from C. E. Moellering's account: "The original Moellering started the business in 1853; his son, the present head of the concern, took hold in 1886 — and he has two fine boys to keep it agoing."

Before any hospital, there was the poor farm: Allen County established its poor farm in June 1853, buying land in Section 29 of Wayne Township and contracting to build a house for $750; George L. Parker was hired that December to keep the county's paupers for $600 a year.

In June 1853 Allen County bought land in Section 29, Wayne Township — the Waynedale area, near present-day Elmhurst — for an asylum for the poor, contracted with John A. Robison to build a house for 750 dollars, and on 9 December 1853 employed George L. Parker to keep the paupers at the poor farm for a year for 600 dollars.

Colerick's Hall: Fort Wayne's first theatre, by the Fort Wayne News's 1907 account of city firsts, was Colerick's Hall, erected by E. F. Colerick in 1853 on the north side of Columbia Street between Clinton and Barr.

Colerick's Hall, erected by E. F. Colerick in 1853 on the north side of Columbia Street between Clinton and Barr and opened on December 20 of that year, was by the Fort Wayne News's 1907 account of city firsts the town's first theatre…

He was probably the Charles Sommers who advertised in October 1853 that he was "putting up daguerreotypes for one dollar, in order to close out his stock," from a studio on Wayne Street west of the Palo Alto Hotel.

The early written record is thin, and what survives is institutional: when Fort Wayne's first free public school opened in September 1853, its first teachers were Mr. Mahurin and Mrs. Hulburd — a woman in the classroom from the system's first day (the Schools chapter carries the opening in full).

The Bass works , established in 1853 as Cooper, Bass & Co., reorganized as Bass & Hanna in 1868 and incorporated by John H. Bass as the Bass Foundry & Machine Company in 1873, grew out of the Fort Wayne Machine Works, which was casting rail iron by 1857 and which John Bass took over in 1862 on his brother Sion's death at Shiloh.

Course: The first free public school opened in September 1853, marked by a procession of pupils through the streets carrying a silk banner.

Summit City Lodge No. 170 was resolved on at a meeting in Wayne Lodge's hall on May 11, 1854 — Colonel Charles Case in the chair — took its dispensation on May 31, and held its first meeting under charter on June 8, 1855, with Case as its first master…

The Ohio and Indiana Railroad was completed to the south side of Fort Wayne on 31 October 1854, and its first locomotive had come up from Toledo the way everything had come for twenty years — by canal boat, shipped in pieces, unloaded at the canal landing and assembled in Francis Comparet's warehouse.

The Fort Wayne Standard — bought by the Baptist minister and reform publisher Daniel W. Burroughs in 1854 from the literary Laurel Wreath line and re-founded as a reform weekly…

Sylvanus Freelove Bowser (8 August 1854 – 3 October 1938), a Fort Wayne man who had worked as a traveling salesman, first devised a wooden plunger for drawing water from a well and applied the same principle to the dangerous business of drawing kerosene from a barrel.

The era's documents are its failures — Clerk Ellis absconding in 1854; the postmastership turning over with every president; and, as late as 1950, the coal scandal, in which the mayor, his police chief and his purchasing agent were indicted together for rigging the city's coal purchases, the purchasing system itself…

In the treaty of 5 June 1854 the United States treated with the Indiana Miami as a tribe and listed, in the revised fourth article, the named persons entitled under the exemption patents — federal recognition, in treaty form, of the eastern group as a distinct party.

The record's roll: Clerk W. E. Ellis, defaulted and absconded, 1854, the office declared vacant by the council.

The Fort Wayne Gas Light Company was incorporated on 6 March 1855, with a plant at the junction of Barr street and the canal; service at first was for interiors only, and after an election in 1857 the people authorized the council to let the company illuminate the streets with gas, the cost laid on property owners in…

The Wabash, 1855: The Pennsylvania's road was the first into Fort Wayne, but not by much.

Hay stood among the staples from the start — 11,055 tons in the Agricultural Society's account of 1856 — and the standard rotation kept every farm cycling through two or three years of grass, timothy and clover, before the plow came round again.

The railroad did not end the outward trade; it industrialized it: The Wabash Railroad was completed from Toledo to Lafayette by way of Fort Wayne in June 1856, and passenger traffic on the canal ceased soon after; freight followed the freight cars.

The Civil War era's first studio, kept by a husband and wife: Byron H. Benham was born at Elba, Genesee County, New York, about 1828, worked at Newark, Ohio, in 1853, and moved his family to Fort Wayne in November 1856, taking the rooms formerly occupied by Hawley and Day on Columbia Street.

A chief over the volunteers: It was not until 1856, Griswold writes, that the city took official recognition of the department: a fire chief was appointed — L. T. Bourie…

The record: James J. Wood (25 March 1856 – 19 April 1928) was born at Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland, and patented his arc-light dynamo on 19 October 1880 — the first of some 240 patents across forty-eight years.

The see: Until 1857 all Indiana belonged to the Diocese of Vincennes. On 8 January 1857 the Holy See erected the Diocese of Fort Wayne from its northern half.

Founded: 1857 — The National Register Baker Street Station nomination states: "In 1857, shortly after the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne, and Chicago Railroad was formed, the directors of the railroad (with encouragement from Samuel Hanna) chose Fort Wayne as the site for the line's all-important repair and construction shops."

On the south side of the tracks, blacksmiths John and Charles Cooper set up shop in 1853; the Kentuckian Sion S. Bass bought the operation in 1854 and built it into a foundry and machine shop; and in September 1857 Jones, Bass and Company sold the works to the new Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railroad, whose directors…

A century of using the rivers as the drain, then a machine to stop: Fort Wayne's first sewer line was completed in 1858, and for the next century and a half the arrangement it began was simple: the city's waste went to the rivers, latterly through a combined system in which one pipe carried sewage and stormwater…

Founding: The Young Men's Christian Association opened its first Fort Wayne location in 1858, fourteen years after the movement's London founding and seven after its first American associations — among the earliest civic institutions in a city then barely two decades old.

Griswold's 1917 biographical volume gives William F. Geller — born in Fort Wayne in 1859 to German parents, apprenticed at eighteen in Christian Hoftner's Fort Wayne bakery, proprietor by his majority of the bakery at Broadway and Washington that the volume calls the leading one of its kind in the city, with "a wide…

The invoice: The same article prints a surviving 1859 account book of A. B. Cole of Noblesville, an agent buying from local trappers for the Ewing fur company of Fort Wayne, and one invoice of furs sold to Ewing, Walker & Co. totaling $3,679.87.