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Trails · The paths the city was built on, and the ones it built back
Fort Wayne began as a trail. The carrying place between the St. Marys River and the Little River was the reason a village, then a fort, then a city stood at the confluence at all, and every transportation age since has laid its own path over the same ground: a canal towpath where mules walked, a railroad where steam locomotives ran, levees raised against the rivers, and in the last fifty years a paved greenway system that follows the rivers the way the first paths did. What follows is that whole line in one record: the ancient portage, the scout hiking trails, the editor's dream of 1975, the three river pathways and the flood works they ride on, the towpath and the Aboite build-out, the Pufferbelly rail trail and the eighty-mile connector it belongs to, the volunteers who patrol it all, the nature preserves where the foot trails run, and the links still closing. Mileages are printed with the year of the source that counted them; where the sources disagree, the disagreement is printed.
The ancestor: the carrying place to Kekionga
Before 1698 - 1794
The route: The first Fort Wayne trail was not built for pleasure or even for local travel. It was a portage, a carrying place, and it connected two worlds: from the St. Marys River, and so from the St. Joseph and the Maumee and…
The scout trail: Pokagon-Kekionga, and hiking as local history
1964 - present
The committee: Between the portage and the greenway there is a middle age of Fort Wayne trails, and it belongs to the Boy Scouts. The Pokagon-Kekionga Trails Committee was formed in 1964 as a service project by Explorer Post 2162…
The dream of 1975: an editor, a consortium, and nine miles
1975 - 1987
The dream: The modern trail system starts, on the record, as one man's wish. "It all started back in 1975," George DeRoche, president of the Greenway Consortium, told The Waynedale News in September 2005. "At that time the River…
Three pathways from the zero marker
2009 - present
The shape: The Rivergreenway is a linear park laid over the city's founding geography. It originates at the confluence of the three rivers, beside the water filtration plant in downtown Fort Wayne, and that point is the zero-mile…
Trails on the levees: the flood work you can walk on
1913 - 2019
Why the trails are high: Fort Wayne's rivers made the city and periodically tried to unmake it. The Floods marker at Headwaters Park records that in the years before dikes the average flood level stood at about fourteen feet…
The Towpath: a canal, an interurban, and a trail walk into Aboite
1832 - 2011
The canal: The Wabash and Erie Canal was the machine built to abolish the portage in the first article of this section, and it was begun at Fort Wayne: ground was broken on 22 February 1832 where the St. Joseph feeder canal was…
Aboite builds its own: a death on Arcola Road and sixteen years of phases
2001 - 2025
The founding: The southwest side of the county built its trail system the way the consortium had built the river one, as citizens first. Aboite New Trails, Inc. was created in December 2001. Input Fort Wayne's reporting gives the…
Pufferbelly: the railroad that became a trail
1868 - present
The railroad: The Pufferbelly Trail runs on the graded bed of a railroad older than most of the city around it. Fort Wayne's own account, in the city's news release of 18 November 2010, dates the line's beginning to 1868: the…
Poka-Bache: the eighty-mile idea
2006 - present
The idea: Every trail in this section until now belongs to one county. The Poka-Bache Connector belongs to the region. It is a State Visionary Trail, initially proposed in 2006 on the coalition's own account, drawn to connect…
Three groups become one, and the Rangers who walk it
2005 - present
The merger: In 2011 the three citizen movements that built Fort Wayne's trails merged into one organization, Fort Wayne Trails, created from Aboite New Trails, the Rivergreenway Consortium and Northwest Allen Trails. Input Fort…
The foot trails: Lindenwood, Fox Island and Eagle Marsh
1974 - present
The other system: Not every Fort Wayne trail is paved, and the unpaved system is as old as the paved one's dream. Its three anchors are nature preserves, and two of them date to the same year, 1974, a year before Ernest…
The newest links, and the loop still to close
2016 - 2026
Waynedale: The mature system's building turned from spokes to stitches, small connections with outsized effect. On Saturday, 16 April 2016, more than a hundred residents turned out for the ribbon cutting of the first trail…
