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 Greenway system was a long desired dream of Ernest Williams, editor of the News Sentinel. He envisioned a way to bring back the beauty and use of the three rivers that played a part in the early history of Fort Wayne." American Trails, in its profile of the system, dates residents' access to a fledgling trail system along the rivers to the mid-1970s, and the Eppley Institute's study of the trail, written in 2001, places its prompting in the rail trail trend of the 1970s and its planning roots in the greenway ideas of Frederick Law Olmsted.

The consortium: The organization that carried the dream was the Greenway Consortium, known in its building years as the Rivergreenway Consortium, a citizen advocacy group that raised money, assembled land and pressed the city to build along the riverbanks. Its formal founding year is not fixed by the sources, and none is invented here; it stands in the record as the project's manager and partner from the early building years onward, still a named party to land acquisition for the Towpath Trail in 2006, and one of the three groups whose merger in 2011 closes its independent story in this section. By 1987, on DeRoche's account, the Consortium had 9 miles of Greenway in use for walking, jogging and hiking.

The honest gap: Which nine miles those were, and which single segment was built first, the sources do not name. The record fixes a dream in 1975, a fledgling system in the mid-1970s, and nine miles by 1987, and it is printed that way, with the first mile's identity held open for a later pass rather than assigned to a plausible candidate. What is certain is the shape the building took: the trails went where the city's own neglected ground already ran in a line, along the riverbanks and the levees, through the parks the rivers touched. The linear park came before the network, and the network is unintelligible without it.

Sources:

1. The Waynedale News, 28 September 2005 (George DeRoche, president of the Greenway Consortium, on Ernest Williams and 1975, and on the 9 miles by 1987).
2. American Trails, Rivergreenway profile, posted 26 March 2018 (the mid-1970s fledgling system; the three advocacy groups).
3. Eppley Institute for Parks and Public Lands, A Study of the Rivergreenway Trail in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, 30 November 2001 (the 1970s rail trail trend; Project Rivergreenway Consortium).