Fort Wayne, Indiana · 20th century
1910s
92 dated events in 1910s, in order. Part of the full timeline.
20th century 92 dated mentions
1910s
- 1910First flights: the Driving Park, 1910
In the fall of 1910 the Glenn Curtiss exhibition team came to town — a News-Sentinel history records the planes arriving by rail, carted out to the park and put together as part of the show — and on 23 October 1910, during that meet, Blanche Stuart Scott flew solo across the Driving Association's field.
- 1910Herb Vigran: the character actor, raised here from sixteen
His obituaries and the standard references make him a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, born June 5, 1910, whose family moved to Fort Wayne when he was sixteen; he attended high school in Fort Wayne.
- 1910–1985Ardelle Glaze: recording wire, then the wire inside the body
The wire: The Business section holds the corporate record of Fort Wayne Metals — Ardelle Glaze (1910–1985) founding it in 1946 to make magnetic recording wire — including Scott Glaze's figure that within five years the company was making 80 percent of the recording wire used in America.
- 1910–1985Ardelle Glaze — the founder who founded it twice
Ardelle Glaze was born in West Virginia in 1910 and grew up in Akron, Ohio; he worked at distilling bourbon, in the baking industry and at machine repair, studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and spent the war years as a research scientist at the Armour Research Foundation in Chicago, on the team that…
- 1911Refrigerators and magnet wire
GE begins Fort Wayne manufacture of the French Audiffren home refrigerator, first unit sold 1911 at about $1,000 (see “Fort Wayne invented the refrigerator, in 1913.” ).
- 1911Wire for the world: the magnet-wire cluster and the die maker
Fort Wayne's wire went out by the trainload; the tools that made wire followed: The electrical trade made Fort Wayne a wire city — Dudlo's magnet-wire works from 1911, then Rea, Phelps Dodge and Essex — and wire is an export good by nature: it ships anywhere copper is wound.
- 1911The Bird Boy's airport: Art Smith in the field record
The airport record needs only the dates that hold the field together: his first publicized home exhibition on 21 October 1911 at the Driving Park, with his mascot kitten Punk riding in a cage on the wing ten days earlier in the local papers' telling…
- 1911The man in the river · Harold Shaw
The finding: In the first days of March 1911, two boys playing at the city dump found a man's body floating in the St. Marys River.
- 1911The Quest Club
The club's own fact sheet fixes its establishment to December 1, 1911, and a member's history — John D. Beatty's "A History of Quest Club at 100 Years," presented October 7, 2011 — records that it was founded by a group of local businessmen as a forum where they could hear lectures that would improve their management and marketing skills.
- 1911–1914Magnet wire — the trade Fort Wayne founded
The founding date is carried three ways in the record: Jacobs formed the Dudlo Wire Company with William Mossman and his son B. Paul Mossman in 1911 and built the Wall Street plant in 1912; the News-Sentinel 's industrial history dates Dudlo Manufacturing's start of the industry to 1914, in a 50-by-100-foot building on Wall Street.
- 1911–1933Dudlo Manufacturing Company (Dudlo Wire Co.)
Founded: Formed 1911; Fort Wayne factory opened 1912. No incorporation record, directory listing or patent record was retrieved, so nothing here rests on a primary record.
- 1911–1934The refrigerator threads: Wolf's Domelre, Mellowes's unit, and the Monitor Top
The factory first: The civic claim "Fort Wayne invented the refrigerator, in 1913" is tried in this history's account “Fort Wayne invented the refrigerator, in 1913.” , which finds the wrong inventor and the wrong year attached to the right factory: General Electric manufactured home refrigerators of Abbé Marcel…
- 1912Shawnee Branch (first the Southside Branch)
The system's first branch opened in 1912 at 2520 South Calhoun Street, serving the city's south side as the Southside Branch.
- 1912Zollner Corporation
Founded: Zollner Machine Works was founded in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1912 by Theodore Zollner, a machinist who had apprenticed at Twin City Iron Works.
- 1912Victor Rea — the wire man who struck out on his own
Victor Rea came up inside George Jacobs's wire works: the company's own ninetieth-anniversary account has him starting as a foreman in 1912 at the Dudlo Company, which had relocated from Cleveland to Wall Street in Fort Wayne the year before.
- 1912–1913The Jefferson Theatre: the house that turned around
Contracts for its construction were let in November 1912 — the Journal-Gazette of November 17, 1912, reported the letting and named the designer, local architect Charles R. Weatherhogg — and on February 2, 1913, the paper carried the announcement that the Jefferson would open on February 8; local histories date the house simply to 1912.
- 1912–1920Suffrage in Fort Wayne · the Franchise League and the factory chapters
In October 1912, when the Indiana Federation of Clubs held its annual meeting in Fort Wayne, the Franchise League held a suffrage luncheon at the same hotel, and the contemporary accounts record that the city's club women "demonstrated an unwavering support for suffrage."
- 1912–1990The named trains — and the long goodbye, 1912–1990
Chief among them was the Pennsylvania's Broadway Limited, the road's flagship New York–Chicago limited, which began service in 1912 (its predecessor, the Pennsylvania Special, dated to 1902) and stopped at Fort Wayne for the whole of its life on the Fort Wayne Line.
- 1912–2002Robert F. Borkenstein: the Breathalyzer, and the legend of the color camera
The man: Robert Frank Borkenstein was born in Fort Wayne on 31 August 1912 and raised here; the Depression ended his schooling, and he worked in Fort Wayne as a photographic technician…
- 1913The Great Flood
The death count is “The 1913 flood killed seven people in Fort Wayne.” . The Fort Wayne flood was one city's share of the Great Flood of 1913, the Easter-week storm system that drowned Dayton and much of the Ohio valley.
- 1913The Great Flood
The Maumee crests at 26.1 ft; some 5,500 homes and businesses damaged, about 15,000 people homeless. The death count is “The 1913 flood killed seven people in Fort Wayne.” .
- 1913The Great Flood · Easter week, 1913
The storms of late March 1913 dropped rain across the whole Ohio Valley — the Midwestern Regional Climate Center's reconstruction puts the runoff at what the region normally sheds in six months — and the valley's rivers rose past every mark they had.
- 1913The forecast record: what Fort Wayne predicted for itself
The Griswold-Phelps handbook of 1913, printing the census series, estimated the city's 1913 population at 78,000 — a booster-era estimate 22 percent above the census of three years before.
- 1913Fort Wayne's Famous Coney Island: the stand that outlasted them all
The oldest plate in the city: The History Center's account gives the stand a 1913 start on Calhoun Street, opened by Greek immigrants; since 1914 it has stood at 131 West Main Street, and in 1916 Vasil Eshcoff, a Macedonian immigrant, bought an interest from one of the three original Greek owners.
- 1913The motor age: tourist cabins, the Lincoln Highway, and the bypass
The guest arrives by car: The automobile reached Fort Wayne's lodging trade down the Lincoln Highway, which crossed Allen County for 33.5 miles on its 1913 route, later US 30.
- 1913The Empress, the Strand, and the Shirley: the Wayne Street corner house
It opened in the fall of 1912 by one local account, on March 9, 1913 by the Cinema Treasures record, as the Empress Theatre, designed by John M. E. Riedel, one of the town's leading architects of the period; in its early years the Empress presented Sullivan & Considine vaudeville alongside pictures.
- 1913The Grand Leader, Stillman's, and the move to the malls
The Grand Leader opened on 15 October 1913 at Wayne and Calhoun in the remodelled White Fruit House quarters, billed as "Fort Wayne's newest department store," with twenty-eight departments under one roof…
- 1913Thirty-eight coffins for Peru
The order: The great flood of March 1913 put some 2,000 Fort Wayne homes under water; the Maumee crested at 26.1 feet on the night of 26 March, the dikes guarding Lakeside breached, martial law was declared, and the relief organisation aided 11,187 people.
- 1913–1919The Lincoln Highway and the First World War
The Lincoln Highway , Carl Fisher's coast-to-coast “Main Street Across America,” dedicated in 1913, entered Allen County from Ohio and ran through New Haven and downtown Fort Wayne, crossing the St. Marys on the Harrison Street bridge — whose plaque still reads “Lincoln Highway Bridge: New York 724 miles – San Francisco 2,660 miles.”
- 1913–1928The Lincoln Highway, the motor club, and the highway that never came
The Lincoln Highway through town: The Lincoln Highway, announced in 1913 as the first transcontinental automobile road, crossed Allen County for 33.5 miles and made Fort Wayne the largest Indiana city on its route.
- 1913–1974Grand Leader — later Stillman's
Founded: Opened 15 October 1913 at Wayne and Calhoun streets, in the remodelled White Fruit House quarters — "Fort Wayne's newest department store," 28 departments, several hundred salespeople, officers J. J. Hursch (president and general manager, formerly of Muncie and Akron), M. C. Landy and Raymond Smythe.
- 1913–2016The barrier-breakers in uniform — the police firsts
The policewomen: The first woman associated with the department was Fannie Winch, appointed the city's first police matron in 1913.
- 1913–2019Trails on the levees: the flood work you can walk on
The Floods marker at Headwaters Park records that in the years before dikes the average flood level stood at about fourteen feet, that dikes raised the flood levels steadily, and that the worst flood on record came in March 1913, when the Maumee rose overnight from seven feet to over twenty-six feet.
- 1913–todayTaxis and the airport — in brief
It appears in the 1913–14 Griswold-Phelps handbook with a published fare card — thirty cents for the first mile for one or two passengers, with added charges by the quarter-mile and for waiting…
- 1914The claims, tested
What the record supports, and what it does not: "The first coney dog was served in Fort Wayne in 1914." This circulates on tourism pages, and it fails: the coney style descends from Charles Feltman's Coney Island stand of 1871, and Greek and Macedonian stands were opening across the Midwest in the same years as Fort Wayne's.
- 1914–1948Ross Lockridge Jr. — a Fort Wayne childhood, a Bloomington life
He was born in Bloomington on 25 April 1914. His family — Indianapolis first, then Fort Wayne — lived in Fort Wayne through his small childhood: he was five when his younger brother Bruce drowned here, and nine when the family returned to Bloomington in 1924.
- 1915Palace Theatre
Ground was broken on 26 May 1914, with a Thanksgiving opening hoped for; the house opened on 25 January 1915.
- 1915Carl Bennett — the man in whose front room the NBA was set in motion
The Fort Wayne Pistons' coach and general manager: Carl Bennett was born in Rockford, Indiana, on 7 December 1915, and came to Fort Wayne through sport.
- 1915The service clubs: Rotary and its company
Rotary: The Rotary Club of Fort Wayne was established on 9 January 1915, when 35 local business professionals and community leaders held their first meeting at the former Commercial Club on Harrison Street.
- 1915The Palace Theatre: the vaudeville palace that became the Civic's home
"One of the most beautiful playhouses in the middle west": The Palace Theatre, at 126 East Washington Boulevard at the corner of Clinton Street, was dedicated on January 25, 1915.
- 1915The vaudeville bills: what played here
The houses' comedy content: Fort Wayne's vaudeville houses are carried as buildings in the Theaters record — the Lyric on South Calhoun (opened October 12, 1908, a vaudeville-and-pictures house that by 1929 had become a burlesque house), the Palace (dedicated January 25, 1915, devoted at its opening exclusively to…
- 1915–todayUniforms and counters · the firsts of the service record
Counters and offices: The Smiley Collection's firsts run across the century — William Smith , the first African American federal employee in Fort Wayne (1915)…
- 1916Polio · the summer of 1916
The 1916 poliomyelitis epidemic — 27,000 cases and 6,000 deaths across the country, Griswold records — reached Indiana, and Fort Wayne's authorities forbade the congregation of all persons sixteen years of age and under: no school, no Sunday school, no theatres, no places of assemblage of any kind.
- 1916The institutions: bureau, co-op, extension, 4-H
The teaching arm arrived with the extension system: Indiana appointed its first county agricultural agent in 1912, the Smith-Lever Act federalized the work in 1914, and Allen County's own extension household organized early — the Allen County Extension Homemakers date their beginning to 1916.
- 1916Boy Scouts: the Anthony Wayne Area Council
Lineage: Scouting's Fort Wayne council line runs, in the Boy Scouts of America's own council records, Fort Wayne Council (1916–1924), Allen County Council (1924–1925), then the Anthony Wayne Area Council, council number 157, headquartered in Fort Wayne.
- 1916–1918George E. Ganiere: the general's second sculptor
The commission: The Anthony Wayne monument was decided in 1916, and it was not, at first, Ganiere's.
- 1916–todayConcordia Lutheran High School — the Luther Institute line
Founded: 1916, as the Luther Institute, founded by Fort Wayne's Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod congregations as a two-year business secondary school teaching typing, shorthand, business law and Bible.
- 1917The city answers · Lexington Day and the first spring
The United States declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. Fort Wayne's first answer, as Griswold records it, came thirteen days later.
- 1917The councils · from Patriotic Service to the Council of Defense
On 27 June 1917 Judge John W. Eggeman, acting at the request of Governor James E. Goodrich, appointed those same officers — together with Fred S. Hunting, the Rev. A. J. Folsom, and Mrs. George Evans — as the Allen County Council of Defense, the county arm of the Indiana Council of Defense.
- 1917Registration day · the draft comes to Fort Wayne
On the evening of 4 June 1917, nearly 6,000 people marched in a "Liberty" parade on the eve of registration. The next day, 5 June, the young men of Fort Wayne between twenty-one and thirty-one presented themselves under the selective conscription act: 7,785 registered in the city.
- 1917A hospital of its own · Unit M
Hospital Unit M was formed in early May 1917: twelve physicians and twenty-one graduate nurses under Miss Elizabeth E. Springer, financed by a fund of $6,250 raised from twenty-five individuals and firms.
- 1917The other purses · the YMCA and Catholic war funds
The Knights of Columbus Catholic War Fund, taken in late July 1917, raised over $9,000 in Allen County — second in the state only to Marion County — under general chairman Maurice C. Niezer, with every Catholic parish in the county organized by districts for the canvass.
- 1917Alien enemies · the registration of 1917
President Wilson's proclamation of 6 April 1917 defined every unnaturalized German resident of fourteen years and upward as an "alien enemy."
- 1917War gardens · the city plants its vacant lots
Putting the food up was the women's half of the campaign: canning demonstrations began on 25 June 1917 under Mrs. J. G. Schwarz of the Woman's Club League and Miss Alma Garvin of Purdue, and from 23 July the "cold pack" demonstrations ran at the Scottish Rite Cathedral.
- 1917Hands for the war · women in the shops, boys in the fields
In early August 1917, E. E. Greist, master mechanic of the Pennsylvania Railroad, appealed for one hundred women to work in the road's main shops, east shops, and roundhouses at Fort Wayne.
- 1917Eastern time · the city's wartime clock
On 1 May 1917 the common council voted, fourteen to one, to adopt the "daylight saving" plan, and on Saturday, 12 May 1917, the city set its clocks one hour ahead.
- 1917Magnavox (The Magnavox Company — Fort Wayne)
Founded (company): Predecessor 1911 , Napa, California; The Magnavox Company formed 5 July 1917.
- 1917The American Red Cross in Allen County
Founding: The Allen County chapter dates itself to the First World War: on 22 January 1917 a letter reached the Allen County Chapter House formally decreeing it a chapter of the American Red Cross — months before the United States entered the war.
- 1917The city that voted itself an hour east
The vote: On 1 May 1917, ten months before Congress passed any standard-time law at all, the Fort Wayne common council voted fourteen to one to move the city's clocks an hour ahead — adopting, in effect, Eastern time on its own authority.
- 1917–1918The First World War · Battery D and the county's war
Two batteries of the 150th Field Artillery — Batteries B and D — were Fort Wayne batteries, serving in the 42nd "Rainbow" Division under Colonel Robert Tyndall through six major engagements; the division went overseas in October 1917, and the county's Gold Star entries give Battery D's embarkation as 18 October 1917.
- 1917–1918The speakers · the Four-Minute Men in brief
In Indiana the work ran through the state speakers' bureau, which, Greenough records, was cooperating with the newly organized Four-Minute Men by May 1917, and a four-minute man addressed factory meetings in Indiana war plants during the loan campaigns.
- 1917–1918The Red Cross drives · the chapter's war chest
The Fort Wayne chapter's institutional history — its charter of 22 January 1917, its workrooms, its nurses — is told in Charities.
- 1917–1918The women on the rolls
Hospital Unit M, organized at Fort Wayne in May 1917 — twelve physicians and twenty-one graduate nurses under Elizabeth E. Springer, directed first by Major Miles F. Porter and then by Dr. Allen Hamilton — is told in the home-front record, and the unit's two nurses who did not come home are carried in the Wars and Charities records.
- 1917–1919The war's rolls, and the flu
Fort Wayne's own battery went early: Battery D of the 150th Field Artillery, an Indiana National Guard battery enlisted at Fort Wayne, sailed with the 42nd (Rainbow) Division in October 1917…
- 1917–1919The loans · five drives and a county that started slow
The First Loan headquarters opened on 4 June 1917 in the former rooms of the Hamilton National Bank, with E. H. McDonald in charge.
- 1917–1919Loyalty's local edge · what the record shows, and what it does not
What the records searched for this section do not show is equally part of the record: no prosecution of a Fort Wayne resident under the Espionage Act of 1917 or the Sedition Act of 1918 appears in them.
- 1917–1919War work · the women's half of two home fronts
The Fort Wayne chapter of the Red Cross, chartered 22 January 1917, ran its workrooms, canteen and drives substantially through women's teams: in the roll-call campaign after the armistice the women's teams netted 85 percent of the $26,399.25 subscribed, and the chapter's own history, Isabelle H. Taylor's War Work of…
- 1917–1940The first wave and its reversal · 1917–1940
In 1917–18 , with war demand and postwar strikes pressing, a number of Fort Wayne manufacturers recruited Black workers from the South, and the city's Black population rose from 572 in 1910 to 1,454 in 1920 and an estimated 2,200 within two years.
- 1917–1998Marion Donovan: the diaper inventor, and a birthplace two institutions dispute
The dispute, printed first: Marion O'Brien Donovan was born on 15 October 1917, and this section cannot tell you where, because the institutions that know her best do not agree.
- 1917–2021The chiefs who came here — a grouped record
Most of Fort Wayne's great companies were, at one time or another, run by men who arrived to run them: Frank Morgan Steers was the Magnavox Company's first president, from 1917, under founders Edwin S. Pridham and Peter L. Jensen, who had invented the moving-coil loudspeaker at their Napa laboratory.
- 1917–2026The corridor · East Central, Hanna Street, and the Green Book
The employers of record along the corridor were often families: Carl and Mamie Wilson , who came in 1917, ran a pool hall, an exterminating company and Wilson's Chicken Shack diner; Preston Lyons Sr. ran Lyon's Trucking Company from 1920 to 1975, the Douglas Cash Market in the 1940s and Lyon's Fish Market in the 1950s.
- 1917–todayBrotherhood Mutual Insurance Company
Founded: 1917, in Fort Wayne, by Albert Neuenschwander and his pastor, Aaron Souder, as a way for local churches to cover damage from fire and natural disasters.
- 1917–todayThe public lineage — IU Extension, Purdue Center, IPFW, and the 2018 split
Founded: Indiana University's Extension Center opened in Fort Wayne in 1917 with 142 students and 12 courses, on the third floor of the courthouse.
- 1918American Art Textile Company (H. I. Pollak)
Founded: Incorporated 7 December 1918 with capital stock of $500,000; works at 920 Osage Street. Officers in the 1923 directory: H. I. Pollak, president; Fred Zollars, vice-president; G. F. Schauer, secretary; Harry Hilgemann, treasurer.
- 1918The food administrator · sugar, coal, and the winter of 1918
In the first week of January 1918 the county's sugar ran out: the Jasper Weekly Courier of 4 January printed the Fort Wayne item that the city's wholesale grocers were "without a grain of sugar in their warehouses," with little relief in sight until the Cuban crop arrived, and that Haffner was urging every person…
- 1918Three crosses in two wars · Chester John Hirschfelder
His first citation, as a captain in the 5th Machine Gun Battalion, 2d Division, near St. Etienne, France, on 4 October 1918, reads: "When an enemy machine gun was inflicting heavy casualties upon his company, Captain Hirschfelder crawled forward alone across a field exposed to heavy machine-gun fire and threw hand…
- 1918American Art Textile Company (Pollak) — the documented record
Founded: The American Art Textile Company was incorporated on 7 December 1918 with $500,000 capital, its works at 920 Osage Street.
- 1918The second wave of Black congregations: First Zion and Pilgrim Baptist
First Zion A.M.E. Zion Church was organized in 1918 with eleven members — the A.M.E. Zion connection, the denomination of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, distinct from Turner Chapel's A.M.E. Church.
- 1918Prohibition's production side: crocks, barns and the Booze Room
The making goes indoors: Indiana's own prohibition law closed the legal trade on April 2, 1918, nearly two years before the nation followed; how that law was enforced here is the Crime section's story, told there and not repeated.
- 1918Herb Shriner: the Hoosier Humorist
The tie: Herb Shriner — born Herbert Arthur Schriner in Toledo, Ohio, on May 29, 1918 — was brought to Fort Wayne as a small child and raised here, a stronger tie than birth alone: this was his hometown in the formative sense, and he made it the substance of his act.
- 1918Workwear: gloves for the shops, socks for the army
The Woman in Industry Service's memorandum of October 1918, surveying the city's women workers, counted the Boss Glove Company employing 200 girls making work gloves, alongside the hosiery mills and the biscuit and lamp works — the clothing Fort Wayne made for other people's labor, produced by Fort Wayne labor.
- 1918–1919Thrift · War Savings Stamps and the 21-cent county
Polk's 1918 Fort Wayne directory carried the appeal as an advertisement: get a Thrift Stamp "to-day — at any post-office, bank or store."
- 1918–1919The canteen · coffee at the troop trains
In the latter part of July 1918 the Red Cross chapter's executive committee organized a canteen service for the trains.
- 1918–1919The arch and the homecoming · names on the square
In September 1918, while the last offensives were still being fought, a wooden memorial went up at the northeast corner of Berry and Calhoun — the record dates its erection to 28 September 1918…
- 1918–1933Prohibition · the dry years, 1918–1933
National repeal came on December 5, 1933, and Centlivre and Berghoff resumed brewing; Fort Wayne's fourteen dry years, which had begun under Indiana's own law in 1918, were over.
- 1918–1991Ken Scott: the fashion gardener from Fort Wayne
The start: George Kenneth Scott was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1918 by his foundation's account (a scholarly essay on the Rizzoli monograph gives 1919, and the bracket is named here rather than silently settled), and he began, as this section requires, as a painter.
- 1918–2017John Collias: a thousand distinguished citizens
The start: John George Collias was born in Fort Wayne on 12 June 1918, to Greek immigrants George and Georgia Collias (one rendering of his obituary prints 1917; the funeral chapel's text, and the age of 98 at his death in March 2017, support 1918, and the leg prints 1918 with the variant named).
- 1918–todayPublic art: the general, the steel, and the alley walls
The equestrian statue of General Anthony Wayne was dedicated on July 4, 1918, in Hayden Park, greeting travelers at the city's Lincoln Highway entrance (ACPL's dedication photographs are captioned 1917; the date is unsettled in the sources and is flagged in this section's note).
- 1919The Legion's flagship · American Legion Fort Wayne Post 47
Fort Wayne Post 47 of the American Legion opened in 1919, the Legion's founding year, on the north side of Wayne Street between Webster and Harrison.
- 1919The first field: inspected 1919, instruction from 1923
In 1919 the city of Fort Wayne inspected a tract on the north side — between the Cook and Ludwig roads, Lima and Coldwater roads country, some 234 acres in its modern survey — for its suitability as a municipal airport.
- 1919The night the sky broke — and the meteorite that isn't
The burst: Shortly before 8:00 p.m. on 26 November 1919, a brilliant meteor crossed far northern Indiana and southern Michigan, seen from Newberry in the Upper Peninsula to Milwaukee and Lucknow, Ontario.
- 1919–1939Basketball before the Pistons: Caseys, Hoosiers, Chiefs and the General Electrics, 1919–1939
Knights of Columbus teams — the K. of C. men, the Caseys — played from 1919, in a city where factory and parish basketball was already a winter institution.