Fort Wayne, Indiana · 19th century
1840s
38 dated events in 1840s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
19th century 38 dated mentions
1840s
- 1840The 1840 treaty · the council agrees to go
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.
- 1840–1866Fort Wayne Times
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.
- 1840–2010The census 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…
- 1840–2026The clerk's desk — keepers of the paper
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.
- 1840–todayEvery mayor, 1840–today
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.
- 1841The county fair: from the Agricultural Society to Carroll Road
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."
- 1841–1847LaFontaine · last principal chief of the united tribe
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…
- 1841–1873The William Robinson Mill (Howe's Mill)
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.
- 1842–1897Orff's Mill (the Edsall Mill, Empire Mill, the Old Stone Mill)
In 1842 and 1843 Rockhill and his partner Samuel Edsall erected two sawmills on those rights.
- 1842–1920The City Mills (C. Tresselt and Sons)
Founded: Construction began in 1842 and the mill was completed and put into operation in 1843 by Allen Hamilton and Jesse L. Williams.
- 1843The canal's grand opening
Through navigation, Toledo to Lafayette by way of Fort Wayne, celebrated with Lewis Cass speaking, the Wabash & Erie at its summit.
- 1843Drinking the St. Joseph: the water supply
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.
- 1843The Odd Fellows: sick benefits from 1844
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.
- 1843The first cameras: itinerants on Columbia Street
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.
- 1843–2026The fairgrounds' other lives, and the line of the grounds
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.
- 1844The Swinney Homestead as a house museum
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…
- 1845Johnny Appleseed dies here
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…
- 1846Removal · October 1846
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"…
- 1846The Miami Removal
Five boats to Cincinnati, a steamboat to Kansas; the party reaches Sugar Creek on 5 November 1846, and several die on the way.
- 1846The Miami Removal
6–7 OCT 1846 FORT WAYNE / KIIHKAYONKI · PERU Hundreds of Myaamia are loaded onto canal boats at Peru and at Fort Wayne for Kansas.
- 1846The Miami Removal · the canal carries its founders away
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.
- 1846Trinity English Lutheran Church
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.
- 1846Concordia Theological Seminary: the Fort Wayne founding
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.
- 1846–1848The Mexican War · the two Fort Wayne companies
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.
- 1846–1861Concordia Theological Seminary
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).
- 1846–1873Kansas, then Oklahoma · the western nation's road
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…
- 1846–1893Fort Wayne Female College — Fort Wayne College — Taylor University
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.)
- 1846–1938St. Augustine Academy
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).
- 1848The ledger of 1848: one year at the Fort Wayne station
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.
- 1848Congregation Achduth Vesholom
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.
- 1848St. Mary Mother of God: the German Catholic parish
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…
- 1848First music: the churches and the first organ
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.
- 1848–1893Gideon Webster Seavey — the hardware house
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."
- 1848–1914The German century: two parish systems and the downtown churchscape
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.
- 1849The scourge · cholera in 1849
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."
- 1849Turner Chapel A.M.E. Church
In 1849 the trustees purchased a lot on the south side of Jefferson Street between Hanna and Francis — and could not build on it.
- 1849–1863Colonization · the offer, and Fort Wayne's answer
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…
- 1849–1979The records that burned: Turner Chapel's archive
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…