Fort Wayne Business and Industry History

Fort Wayne, Indiana · topic

Fort Wayne Business and Industry History

Companies, owners, banks, factories, inventions and fortunes.

General Electric Company, Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1909 photographic print. Public domain · source file

Fort Wayne Business History: Every Company in the Record, Oldest FirstBusiness · the full record, oldest firstEvery business in the record, from the trading houses of 1818 to the steel and software-era firms of today — founded, founders, what it did, its course, and its fate, with sources on each entry.104 entry pages § 25Fort Wayne Business Owners: A Historical Directory by EraThe Business Owners Roster · Every owner the record names, and their businessThis is a list, not a narrative: one line for each business owner the record reached, with the business they owned. It is drawn from the city directories (Williams' and Polk's, read on archive.org) — their classified…4 entry pages

Fort Wayne Founders and CEOs: The People Who Built Its CompaniesFounders & Chief Executives · The people who started Fort Wayne's companies, and the chief executives it producedFort Wayne's business history is usually told as a history of firms — the pump works, the wire mills, the knitting mills, the insurers. This section tells it as a history of people. Some of them are already profiled in…26 entry pages

Fort Wayne Dealerships: The Houses That Sold the City Its CarsThe Dealerships · The houses that sold Fort Wayne its carsFort Wayne built trucks by the hundreds of thousands and designed the Scout, but the car most residents actually knew was the one a local house sold them, serviced for them, and took back in trade. The dealer trade has…11 entry pages

Fort Wayne Banks: A History of the City's Banking SystemBanks · Fort Wayne's banking systemBanks · Fort Wayne's banking system12 entry pages

How Fort Wayne Became a Factory City: The Industrial RevolutionThe Industrial Revolution · how Fort Wayne became a factory cityThis section tells one story: the transformation. In 1840 Fort Wayne was a canal town of about two thousand people whose goods were made by masters and apprentices in shops a man could walk across. Within two…14 entry pages

Fort Wayne Inventors and Inventions: The Patent RecordInventors, Inventions & Breakthroughs · the patent recordFort Wayne likes to say things were invented here, and unusually often the saying survives the checking — but not always, and never in exactly the shape the saying takes. This section works from the patent record and…21 entry pages

Fort Wayne Technology: The Industry and Its MoversTechnology Out of Fort Wayne · The Industry and Its MoversFort Wayne's technology story is not a startup story. For a century and a half the city made the electrical industry's working parts — arc lamps, fractional-horsepower motors, transformers, and the enamelled magnet wire…12 entry pages

Fort Wayne and the Dot-Com Era: The People Behind the Web WinnersThe Dot-Com Winners · Fort Wayne on the WebAsked plainly — did anybody from Fort Wayne win the dot-com era? — the record answers yes, but in a particular shape. The city produced people more readily than companies. Its biggest winner of the era never took a…11 entry pages § 17Farming in Fort Wayne and Allen County: Crops, Markets and the LandFarms · The ground that fed the cityFort Wayne began as a trading post in a forest, and for its first century the city's life ran on what the clearings around it could grow. The county that organized around the fort in 1824 became, by the measure of its…11 entry pages

Tractors in Fort Wayne and Allen County: Threshers, Dealers and Farm MechanizationTractors · The Farm Tractor in Fort Wayne and Allen CountyFort Wayne built trucks by the million and called some of them tractors, but in the record reached it never built a farm tractor — not on a production line, and not as a named prototype or one-off that any source stands…13 entry pages

What Fort Wayne Sold to the World: A History of Its ExportsExports · What Fort Wayne sold to the worldFort Wayne was an outward-looking town before it was much of a town at all. The portage between the Maumee and the Wabash made the place a transfer point for furs in the French and British years, and the same geography…12 entry pages

Fort Wayne's Great Fortunes: Money Made, Kept and Given AwayWealth: Fortunes Made, Kept, and Given AwayFort Wayne's money has a shape, and it changes by era. The first fortunes were furs, treaty annuities, and land at the meeting of three rivers. The canal and the railroads turned land and banking paper into the second…26 entry pages

Lottery and Crypto Windfalls in Fort WayneLottery & Crypto · windfall money, on the recordFort Wayne played the numbers long before Indiana sold them, in the tolerated gambling rooms the Crime section describes, and it has played the state's game since the first scratch-off tickets were sold on October 13…12 entry pages

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Using this page? Copy a credit line. Last updated November 10, 2026.

Source: Fort Wayne Business and Industry History, Moosed History by Project Moosed, https://history.projectmoosed.com/usa/midwest/indiana/fort-wayne/topics/business-industry/

@misc{moosed-business-industry,
  title        = {{Fort Wayne Business and Industry History}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://history.projectmoosed.com/usa/midwest/indiana/fort-wayne/topics/business-industry/}},
  organization = {Project Moosed},
  note         = {Moosed History. Last updated 2026-11-10. Accessed 2026-11-10},
  year         = {2026}
}