Fort Wayne, Indiana · 19th century
1830s
38 dated events in 1830s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
19th century 38 dated mentions
1830s
- 1830The trial of Big Leg · 1830
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.
- 1830The forty acres: county purchase and canal land inside the plat
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.
- 1830Mills on the rivers
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…
- 1830The series in full: city and county, census by census, 1830–2020
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.
- 1830The eras of growth, read off the numbers
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.
- 1830Rudisill Mill (the Johns Mill, the St. Joe Mill)
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…
- 1830–1883The famous trials of the scaffold era · the record owned by the Crime section
In 1830 the Miami leader Big Leg — Neewilenkwanka — stood trial in the county's early court, a case the Crime addendum carries.
- 1831First Presbyterian Church
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.
- 1831St. Augustine's: the first Catholic parish
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.
- 1832Canal groundbreaking
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.
- 1832Ground is broken for the canal
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.
- 1832The canal's river engineering: feeder dam, feeder canal, aqueduct
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.
- 1832–1882Before the iron horse — the canal, and the railroad that replaced it
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.
- 1832–2011The Towpath: a canal, an interurban, and a trail walk into Aboite
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.
- 1833–1849Buckets, hooks and ladders — the first fire company
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.…
- 1833–1865Hugh McCulloch's ladder
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…
- 1833–2020The Sentinel (later the News-Sentinel)
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…
- 1834–1838The Forks of the Wabash, 1834 and 1838: the reserves are bought back
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…
- 1834–1863The watch, the policemen, and the force of 1863
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.
- 1835The battle that wasn't: the canal Irish, 10 July 1835
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.”
- 1835The canal opens a market, 1835–1843
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.
- 1835–1856Working the canal: tolls, packets, and the Dock
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.
- 1835–1857Fort Wayne branch, State Bank of Indiana
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.
- 1835–1857The State Bank branch — Fort Wayne's first money
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.
- 1836The canal-era houses: American, Rockhill, Hedekin
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.
- 1836–1850Horace Rockwell: the first professional painter
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.
- 1837Barr Street: the public market, 1837 to today
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.
- 1837The notable farms: two centuries on the same ground
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…
- 1837St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church, and the German Lutheran beginning
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.
- 1837–todayBarr Street Market
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.
- 1837–todaySt. Paul's Lutheran School
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.
- 1838Paige & Fry's Tannery
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).
- 1838Taylor, Freeman & Company
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…
- 1838–1844The one standing house · Alexander T. Rankin and 818 South Lafayette
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…
- 1838–1850The exempted · the families who could stay
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…
- 1839Trinity Episcopal Church
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.
- 1839–1874The Anthony Waynes and the rival companies
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.
- 1839–1972The houses
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.