Fort Wayne, Indiana · 19th century
1850s
43 dated events in 1850s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
19th century 43 dated mentions
1850s
- 1850The Black population series, 1850–2020
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.
- 1850Archibald McDonald, the busiest daguerreian of the fifties
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.
- 1850The women of the trade
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…
- 1850–1876By 1850 the map is private
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.
- 1850–2020The count · Black Fort Wayne in the censuses
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.
- 18511851 · the exclusion vote
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…
- 1851The York Rite: Chapter, Council and Commandery
Fort Wayne Chapter No. 19, Royal Arch Masons, was chartered May 24, 1851.
- 1851–1870Exclusion and decline · what Article XIII did here
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…
- 1851–1892Marmaduke M. M. Slattery: the alternating-current man
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…
- 1851–1914The depots — Fort Wayne's succession of front doors
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…
- 1852Before museums: the relic culture
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.
- 1852Charles C. Stevens and the last blockhouse
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…
- 1853Fort Wayne Gas Light Company — dissolution and the line to NIPSCO
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.
- 1853Moellering Construction Company
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."
- 1853The county asylum and its insane ward
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.
- 1853The county poor farm: Allen County's first institution of relief
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.
- 1853Before the companies: Fort Wayne's first stages
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.
- 1853Before the palaces: halls, opera houses, and the Temple Theatre
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…
- 1853–1869Carl Sommer, the enduring German
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.
- 1853–1887The benevolent era opens · teachers, soldiers' aid and the first societies
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).
- 1853–1900Iron: Bass, Olds, and the wheel trade
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.
- 1853–todayFort Wayne Community Schools — the founding
Course: The first free public school opened in September 1853, marked by a procession of pupils through the streets carrying a silk banner.
- 1854The mother lodge's children, and the temples they built
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…
- 1854The first locomotive arrived by boat, in pieces
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.
- 1854–1855The abolitionist press · D. W. Burroughs and the Fort Wayne Standard
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…
- 1854–1938Sylvanus Freelove Bowser: the pump inventor's own record
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.
- 1854–1992From patronage to merit — how the service was reformed
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…
- 1854–2002A persistent people · the recognition fight
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.
- 1854–2026Scandal and honor — the service judged
The record's roll: Clerk W. E. Ellis, defaulted and absconded, 1854, the office declared vacant by the council.
- 1855–1881Water and light — the utilities of safety
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…
- 1855–1882The trunk-line city — Wabash, the south and north lines, and the Nickel Plate
The Wabash, 1855: The Pennsylvania's road was the first into Fort Wayne, but not by much.
- 1856Forage, pasture, and the seed harvest
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.
- 1856Pork, grain and whiskey by rail: the shipping-point decades
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.
- 1856Byron and Almira Benham: paper pictures and the Ladies Picture Gallery
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.
- 1856–1882Steamers, the alarm telegraph, and the paid department
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…
- 1856–1928James J. Wood: two hundred forty patents
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.
- 1857The Diocese of Fort Wayne (now Fort Wayne–South Bend) and its cathedral
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.
- 1857–1953Pennsy Shops (Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago Railroad shops)
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."
- 1857–1953The Pennsy Shops — where Fort Wayne built locomotives
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…
- 1858The sewers, and the tunnel under everything
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…
- 1858The YMCA of Greater Fort Wayne
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.
- 1859The bread record: wrapped bread, German bakers, and the smell over downtown
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…
- 1859The fur trade's ledger: the first animal census is an invoice
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.