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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 of Garrett and Troop 352 of Fort Wayne. The new committee was delegated to promote historical trail hiking and maintain those trails, operating under the sanction of the local council and the rules of the National Council of the Boy Scouts of America. With help from Ouabache State Park and Pokagon State Park and its own man and boy power, the committee blazed and marked its routes: by February 1968 it counted 13 trails, and it maintains 20 today.
The Kekionga Trail: The committee's Fort Wayne route is the Kekionga Trail, 10 miles long, and its trail literature opens with a short history of Fort Wayne that every hiking unit is meant to hear before it walks: the glacial lake, the Miami headquarters at Kekionga, the portage ten miles southwest to the headwaters of the Little Wabash, in the committee's own course description, where the portage literature in the first article of this section says the Little River. The difference is printed as a difference; the two names belong to two tellings, and the scout version is the one thousands of local boys learned the city's shape from. The committee's history runs on through the christening of Fort Wayne on 22 October 1794 to the fort's abandonment as a military post by 1819.
What it proves: A generation before the city had a greenways department, Fort Wayne already had an organized trail system, maintained by volunteers, built around the idea that a trail is a history lesson you walk. The endpoints of the committee's world are the same two state parks, Pokagon and Ouabache, that the state's paved connector was later drawn between, and the committee took its name from the same two places: Pokagon and Kekionga. The paved network gets the mileage in this section. The scouts got there first with the names.
Sources:
- Pokagon-Kekionga Trails Committee, About Us (the 1964 formation, the 1968 count of 13 trails, the 20 trails maintained today).
- Pokagon-Kekionga Trails Committee, Kekionga Trail (the 10-mile course and its short history of Fort Wayne).