Fort Wayne, Indiana · 19th century
1860s
48 dated events in 1860s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
19th century 48 dated mentions
1860s
- 18601860 · the Douglas ovation
Fort Wayne in 1860 was a Douglas town, and it showed him the largest demonstration in its history to that day.
- 1860The Aveline House: the city's leading hotel for forty-five years
After three years of effort to secure financial backing, he built his hotel in 1860–62, with D. J. Silver as builder and contractor, at Calhoun and Berry across from the courthouse…
- 1861Noble G. Olds and Henry G. Olds — wagon wheels for a continent
The Olds fortune began with a carpenter: Noble G. Olds, a carpenter and machinist, settled in Fort Wayne in 1861 and established the family's lumber yard, machine works and wagon-wheel making.
- 1861The machinery · enrollment, draft boards, recruiting
In April 1861 the enrollment of Civil War volunteers ran through law offices and the canal collector's office — the lists headed by Major William H. Link and Captains George Humphrey and William P. Segur were placed, in Griswold's account, in the offices of Withers and Morris, Judge Hanna and the canal office, "where…
- 1861The seminary leaves, and returns: 1861–1976
In 1861, with the Civil War opening, the seminary followed its sister institution's logic in reverse: Missouri, unlike Indiana, did not draft theological students, so the seminary moved to St. Louis while Concordia College moved into the Fort Wayne campus the seminarians vacated.
- 1861The rectifier's city: B. Trentman and the wholesale liquor houses
The directory of 1861–62 lists B. Trentman under the single heading "Liquors"; the Williams directory of 1864–65 refines the classification and gives him two headings to himself — "RECTIFIER: Trentman B." and "WINES AND LIQUORS: Trentman B." — the only name under the rectifier heading in the book.
- 1861–1865Camp Allen and the Civil War
The women of Fort Wayne had made and presented the 30th's silk colour in 1861; it is in the History Center's collection today.
- 1861–1865Camp Allen · the Civil War camp
1861–1865 NORTHWEST BANK OF THE ST. MARYS · NOW CAMP ALLEN PARK Fort Wayne's Civil War mustering ground stood south of Main Street on the St. Marys, on what is now the 3.5-acre Camp Allen Park.
- 1861–1865The Civil War · the full roster
The Bureau's 2010 review of the marker adds that the 142nd Indiana was recruited in July 1864 and rendezvoused at Fort Wayne — likely at Camp Allen — and notes that the marker's own "1861–64" span is not itself provable.
- 1861–1957Concordia College — the gymnasium
Founded: The synod's combined high school and junior college, founded in Perry County, Missouri in 1839 and moved to St. Louis in 1847, came to Fort Wayne in 1861 in the swap with the seminary.
- 1862Kerr Murray — the foundryman
Kerr Murray was a Scottish-born machinist who established his foundry and machine business in Fort Wayne in 1862 — trading as Murray & Bennigan by the fall of 1863 and Murray & Baker by 1872.
- 1862–1871The first clubs: the Summit Citys and the Kekiongas, 1862–1871
In April 1862, with the Civil War a year old, several young men of the city formed the Summit City Club to play the new game of base ball.
- 1862–1912Kerr Murray Manufacturing Company
Founded: The business was established in 1862 by Kerr Murray, doing general foundry and machine work. By fall 1863 the firm traded as Murray & Bennigan; by 1872 as Murray & Baker, advertising steam engines, boilers and gas works, with works on Calhoun Street adjoining the railroad depots.
- 1863Charter No. 11 — the First National Bank
The charter: The National Banking Act of 1863 created a federal charter for banks, and Fort Wayne took one of the first.
- 1863–1864The labor record begins · 1863–1864
In 1863 the railroad men formed the city's first organized labor body — an organizer named Fincher planted it, and the printers followed — and in 1864 they struck.
- 1863–1864Copperheads and the Sons of Liberty · the Fort Wayne edge of the treason-trial era
The lineage, as the Indiana Historical Bureau summarizes it, ran from the Knights of the Golden Circle , founded in the mid-1850s under George W. L. Bickley to spread slavery southward, through a change of name and trappings in 1863 to the Order of American Knights , and in 1864 to the Sons of Liberty…
- 1863–1908The Aveline House
Founded: Completed in January 1863 at the southeast corner of Berry and Calhoun streets, the town's grand hotel of the Civil War era and for a generation the largest hotel of the region.
- 1863–1917First National Bank of Fort Wayne
Founded: Organised in 1863 under the new National Banking Act, among Indiana's first national banks. Griswold's account (the passage opens mid-sentence in the surviving text) names the organising circle ending "…and Alfred D. Brandriff.
- 1863–1933First National Bank of Fort Wayne — the consolidations and the Depression-era end
Course: The Businesses section carries the bank from its 1863 organisation (capital raised from $100,000 to $400,000; presidents Oscar A. Simons, John H. Bass and Charles H. Worden) through its two great consolidations: the White National Bank consolidated into it in August 1905, and in April 1917 it consolidated with…
- 1863–2026The chiefs of police — from the night watch to Caudill
The first chiefs: Fort Wayne's regular police force dates from May 1863 — a captain, a lieutenant and two patrolmen from each ward, on duty from twilight to daylight — and its first chief was Conrad Pens, a German sailor.
- 1864B'nai B'rith, Hibernians, and the ethnic lodge layer
Lodges within communities: The Private Clubs section carries the B'nai B'rith lodge's outline — the organized social presence of Fort Wayne's Jewish community, meeting in the Bass Block…
- 1864John A. Shoaff and the Shoaff Building
He graduated from the Methodist College and opened Shoaff's Art Gallery at the northwest corner of Calhoun and Main, appearing first in the city directory of 1864–65.
- 1864–1942Peter Eckrich — the Waldsee butcher
One genealogy rendering gives his birth as 21 January 1864 against the 2 January date the company's and the genealogical society's accounts carry.
- 1864–1971Fort Wayne High School — Central High School
The Indiana Historical Society's sketch of the school's own archive gives 1864, when Fort Wayne High School opened on East Wayne Street as the city's only public high school, and the school's own 1914 Caldron yearbook illustrates fifty years, 1864 to 1914.
- 1865The fraternal layer: Masons, Elks, Eagles, Moose
The B'nai B'rith Lodge — organized April 15, 1865 in the 1915 and 1923 directories, March 1864 in an 1873–74 directory, a conflict the record carries unsettled — met in the Bass Block — the organized social presence of the city's Jewish community two generations before the country-club question arose anywhere in America.
- 1865Fort Wayne entertains the state fair: October 1865
The Thirteenth Indiana State Fair was held here from Monday 2 October to Saturday 7 October 1865, on grounds which now form a portion of Lawton Park, the city's new north side park, bought in the January of the year before.
- 1865–1868Royal Baking Powder: the Hoaglands and Thomas Biddle
Griswold's 1917 pictorial history dates the beginning to 1865: Joseph C. Hoagland, a Fort Wayne druggist, "compounded a combination of chemicals to meet the needs of the housewife," samples were distributed to Fort Wayne homes and met with popular favor, and Thomas M. Biddle and Cornelius N. Hoagland were his…
- 1865–1874Merchants National Bank
Founded: Chartered 1 May 1865, at the northwest corner of Berry and Calhoun streets. President: Peter P. Bailey.
- 1865–1905The ancestor, part two: steam traction and the threshing era
The point is visible as early as 1865: the portable engines the Chicago Tribune named in the power department of that year's state fair in Fort Wayne were out-of-town machines, from a Richmond maker and from Lane & Bodley of Hamilton, Ohio, shown alongside this city's own threshers and reapers.
- 1865–1917The national-bank generation
The charters: The state branch converted first: in 1865 the Fort Wayne branch of the Bank of the State of Indiana took a national charter, No. 865, as the Fort Wayne National Bank, with Stephen B. Bond — Allen Hamilton & Co.'s old cashier — as president; its profile is in the business record.
- 1865–1960The Hamilton cousins: Norah, Jessie, and the watercolor architect
Jessie: Her cousin Jessie Hamilton (1865-1960), of the homestead branch of the family, worked in the quieter medium: an etching, "Landscape," by her hand is held by the museum in the James Hamilton Collection, which is how her work survived, inside her cousin's gift.
- 1865–1992The German city sings: Turners, Männerchor, and Germanfest
The Fort Wayne Turners were organised in 1865 as the Turnverein, a gymnastics society on the Turner principle that physical fitness leads to a sound mind, and stand as the oldest German club in Fort Wayne.
- 1865–1998Fort Wayne National Bank
Founded: The name dates to 1865, when the Fort Wayne branch of the Bank of the State of Indiana adapted itself to the National Banking Act and took the title of the Fort Wayne National Bank, with Stephen B. Bond — Allen Hamilton's former cashier — as president (Griswold).
- 1866The solar-camera patent: Joseph Dille, Elisha Poston, and the view from the rooftops
He appears in the Fort Wayne directory of 1866–67 in partnership with Augustus C. Crane in a Photograph Gallery at 136 Columbia, and in 1868–69 alone as portrait painter and photographer at 44 Calhoun Street, opposite the courthouse…
- 1866–1890Fort Wayne Paper Mills (the Fleming Paper Mills)
Founded: The first paper mill put into operation in Allen County was erected in 1866 on the west bank of the St. Joseph River a few rods south of the St. Joseph Center Road bridge (the Paper Mill Bridge), in the south portion of the former Richardville reservation, St. Joseph Township…
- 1866–1957Homer Davisson: the dean on Pontiac Street
The making: Homer Gordon Davisson was born in Blountsville, in Henry County, Indiana, in 1866, found landscape painting at DePauw, and left before graduation to do what ambitious American painters of his generation did: the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Art Students League in New York, the Corcoran School of…
- 1867Veterans' institutions · the posts in brief
Fort Wayne's first Grand Army of the Republic post met as early as May 1867 in the old Odd Fellows hall on Calhoun Street.
- 1867The Grand Army of the Republic: the veterans who ran the lodge city
Fort Wayne's GAR story begins almost with the order itself — the national post history kept by the Sons of Union Veterans records an early post existing in Fort Wayne by May 1867, meeting in the Odd Fellows' Hall on Calhoun Street, on the evidence of the Fort Wayne Daily Gazette of May 1, 1867…
- 1867–1963Edith Hamilton — the classicist of Clinton and Lewis
Edith Hamilton was born in Dresden, Germany, on 12 August 1867, to American parents — Montgomery Hamilton and Gertrude Pond Hamilton — and was brought to Fort Wayne as an infant, to the town her grandfather Allen Hamilton had helped build.
- 1867–1963Edith Hamilton: the classicist Fort Wayne raised
She was born on 12 August 1867 in Dresden, Germany, where her American parents, Montgomery Hamilton and Gertrude Pond Hamilton, were living, and she was raised, from infancy, in Fort Wayne.
- 1868–todayPufferbelly: the railroad that became a trail
Fort Wayne's own account, in the city's news release of 18 November 2010, dates the line's beginning to 1868: the Fort Wayne to Jackson, Michigan railroad, later the Fort Wayne, Jackson and Saginaw, became part of the New York Central system in 1880, operated as Penn Central in the 1970s, ceased operation in 1976, and…
- 1869The killers of the well-and-privy city · the board's count for 1869
The board of health's report on the year 1869 is the first full accounting of what killed Fort Wayne, and it is the baseline of this record.
- 1869St. Joseph Hospital: the first hospital, 1869
The accounts differ on the purchase itself, and both stand: the order's tradition credits Bishop Luers with buying the hotel with his own money, while Sister Virginia Kampwerth's history of the province, With Loving Concern , quotes Sister Rose Blum's letter that Father Edward Koenig purchased the building for $52,000…
- 1869The singing societies: Fort Wayne's German chorus
Eight choruses, one line: On October 4, 1869, German immigrants organized the Fort Wayne Sängerbund, the city's first German male chorus, dedicated from the start to preserving German heritage as expressed in choral music.
- 1869The Pufferbelly · a railroad that became a trail
The Pufferbelly Trail runs on the roadbed of the Fort Wayne, Jackson and Saginaw Railroad, built north from Fort Wayne beginning in 1869 — eighteen months, in Bill Adams' telling, to build the line toward Michigan — and later a New York Central corridor.
- 1869–1919Alice Hamilton: the founder of industrial medicine, raised here
The formation: Alice Hamilton (27 February 1869 – 22 September 1970) was born in New York City and raised on her family's estate in Fort Wayne, educated at home in a household that expected its daughters to achieve…
- 1869–1970Alice Hamilton — the sister who wrote the handbooks
Edith's younger sister Alice, born in New York City on 27 February 1869 and raised on the same Clinton-and-Lewis estate, wrote the books that founded a medical field: Industrial Poisons in the United States (1925) and Industrial Toxicology (1934), the handbooks of the occupational medicine she created out of her Hull…
- 1869–1970Alice Hamilton: the first woman on Harvard's faculty, raised on the same estate
The second sister: Alice Hamilton was born on 27 February 1869 in New York City, the second of Montgomery and Gertrude Hamilton's daughters, and like Edith she was raised in Fort Wayne, in the sheltered, book-filled world of the family estate, three blocks of downtown ground her grandfather Allen Hamilton, an Irish…