Fort Wayne, Indiana · 19th century
1870s
27 dated events in 1870s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
19th century 27 dated mentions
1870s
- 1870Plymouth Congregational Church
The congregation: The Congregationalists, the last of the old New England denominations to organize in Fort Wayne, formed Plymouth Congregational Church in 1870, in the post–Civil War building wave that filled the downtown with churches.
- 1870The county in numbers: the census frame
The official reports quoted in the county history of 1880 counted 4,916 farms in Allen County in 1870, when the county's wheat crop alone ran to 432,752 bushels and its farms churned 543,322 pounds of butter.
- 1871The first game of the first professional league
The Fort Wayne Kekiongas beat Cleveland 2–0, “first” only because Boston–Washington was rained out the day before.
- 1871Horton Manufacturing Company
Founded: Co-founded in 1871 by John Claus Peters and Henry C. Paul. Founders: John Claus Peters and Henry C. Paul — Paul appears again in this record as president of the Fort Wayne Electric Works in 1899 (see the Jenney Electric entry).
- 1871Henry C. Paul and Samuel M. Foster — the organisers
Some founders are remembered as the second name on the charter: Henry C. Paul co-founded the Horton Manufacturing Company in 1871 with John Claus Peters — Peters is profiled in the People sections; Paul is not — and Horton built the first contained washing machine into a national brand.
- 1871A city that built instruments: the Fort Wayne Organ Company and Packard pianos
Isaac T. Packard was a Chicago organ builder whose business was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871; local tradition holds that he boarded a train east and got off where his fare ran out — Fort Wayne.
- 1871The first game: the ground professional baseball forgot
On May 4, 1871, the Fort Wayne Kekiongas beat the Cleveland Forest Citys 2–0 at the Kekionga Ball Grounds — the first game of the National Association, the first professional league game in America, with Bobby Mathews pitching the shutout.
- 1871–1941John J. Tokheim and Ralph F. Diserens — the pump company that was moved here
Tokheim was not a Fort Wayne founding, and this entry says so plainly: John J. Tokheim, born 17 May 1871 at Odda, Norway, and died 15 March 1941, founded his pump company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa — the Business record carries both an organisation in 1900 and an incorporation in 1901.
- 1871–1952Horton Manufacturing Company — course and fate
The founding, two accounts: the Businesses section carries the account from local history writing (Castaldi, Fort Wayne Magazine, May 2017) of a Fort Wayne founding in 1871 by Peters & Paul.
- 1872–1892Streetcars, telephones, water
In 1872 the Citizens Street Railway put horse-drawn cars on Calhoun Street, running from the Pennsylvania depot to Main Street, with branches following.
- 1872–1947Streetcars — the city's own rails
Fort Wayne's streetcars began with horse cars: the Citizens Street Railroad Company opened horse-drawn service on Calhoun Street in 1872 (one strand of the record dates the first horse-trolley line to 1871), and the Centlivre brewery's line ran out Spy Run to the brewery from 1887.
- 1872–1947The street railway in brief — the system this story inherits
Horses on Calhoun: The Citizens Street Railroad Company opened horse-drawn service on Calhoun Street in 1872 — one strand of the record dates the first horse-trolley line to 1871 — running from the Pennsylvania Railroad depot north to the Aveline Hotel at Main and Calhoun.
- 1873–1883The grave-robbery panic · the resurrection years
In December 1873 the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported that circulars had reached the city's physicians from medical colleges offering "LIBERAL PRICES FOR GOOD SUBJECTS," and the men who dug for that market carried the era's names in the papers: ghouls, resurrectionists, tomb tappers.
- 1873–1918Panics, and the clearing house
1873 and 1893: The national panics reached Fort Wayne as pressure, not as a local failure record. The Merchants National Bank discontinued in 1874, in the panic of 1873's long shadow, but no source found for this history ties its closing to the panic, and the connection is not asserted here.
- 1875“Our Murderers” · the docket the Sentinel counted in November 1875
On 6 November 1875 the Fort Wayne Daily Sentinel stopped and counted.
- 1876–1886Catholic charity's first institutions: Sacred Heart Home, St. Vincent de Paul, St. Vincent Villa
The sequence: Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Fort Wayne–South Bend traces its own prehistory, in its centennial history, to three Fort Wayne foundations of the diocese's first decades: the Sacred Heart Home for the aged in 1876, a St. Vincent de Paul Society established in the diocese in 1879, and St. Vincent…
- 18771877 · the great railroad strike comes to Fort Wayne
The national railroad strike of 1877 — the Great Upheaval that began on the Baltimore & Ohio and shut down rail lines across the country — reached Fort Wayne.
- 1877Kept animals: the stockyard and the zoo
The Fred Eckart Packing Company — founded in 1877 in the county record; its great West Main Street plant opened in 1887 in the News-Sentinel's Cityscapes history, both dates carried as their sources give them — ran a slaughterhouse at 1825 West Main whose rear stockyard could hold 2,000 animals.
- 1877–1952Barbers, beauty culture, physicians, undertakers · the early professions
The Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's Marsha Smiley Collection — its "Crossing Opportunity's Threshold" profiles of Black pioneers — records Frances and Emma Anderson as beauty shop owners in 1877 , among the earliest Black businesswomen in the city's record.
- 1877–1952Ross Lockridge Sr. — the father, in one paragraph
Ross F. Lockridge, born in Miami County in 1877, came to Fort Wayne and worked from 1914 to 1922 as employment manager and welfare director at Wayne Knitting Mills; while here he helped organize the Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society, and he built the statewide reputation…
- 1878The city hospital line: City Hospital, Hope, and Methodist, 1878–1953
The municipal beginning: Parkview Health traces its origin to 1878, and the record underneath the claim is a real one, though not the record of a purpose-built hospital.
- 1878Miles F. Porter and the age of bold surgery
A national surgeon in a canal city: The first Fort Wayne physician whose work reached national medicine was Miles F. Porter (1856–1933), born in Decatur, who took his medical degree from the Medical College of Ohio in 1878 and practiced in Fort Wayne for fifty-four years.
- 1878The band era: brass in the parks
The 1878 city directory's "Bands of Music" listing names the Fort Wayne City Band (brass and string), Leifels' Band, the St. Cecilia Brass and String Band, and St. Mary's Brass Band — a municipal band, a commercial band, and parish bands, in a city of some thirty thousand.
- 1879The state school comes to Fort Wayne
An institution for children, built at the edge of town: Indiana opened its institution for children with developmental disabilities at Knightstown in 1879 — first called the Asylum for Feeble Minded Children, then the Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth…
- 1879William Salzmann, photographer to the German city
In Fort Wayne he opened a studio at 150 Calhoun Street in 1879 that catered to the city's large German population; in 1883 he moved to 164 Calhoun, opposite the Cathedral, which established him as a favorite of local Catholics.
- 1879The wheel before the network · ordinaries, safeties and the Fort Wayne Bicycle Club
The early bicycle period in the city, 1879 to 1900, is documented in Cleo Goff Wilkens' resume of the era, Ordinaries, Safeties and Fun , preserved by the Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society.
- 1879–1905The medical colleges — Fort Wayne College of Medicine
The Fort Wayne College of Medicine was founded August 22, 1879, out of a faculty split over human dissection. Christian B. Stemen was its registrar and a professor, and its dean by 1885.