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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, 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. Through the 1980s, in the Urban Land Institute's summary, frequent flooding led the community to wall off the rivers with levees. The greenway was being built in the same decades, on the same banks, and the two works grew together: a levee is a raised, grassed, continuous path along a river whether anyone calls it a trail or not, and the St. Joe Boulevard Pathway in this section is a flood control project with a trail surface on top of it.
1982: The flood that defines the modern system began on Saturday, 13 March 1982, the second worst in the city's history. Some 9,000 people were evacuated, and the city was saved at its dikes by an army of volunteers, thousands of them school students, who filled, hauled and stacked hundreds of thousands of sandbags in what officials dubbed the children's crusade. At the Pemberton Dike, a large aging dike in a northeast neighborhood, the students' sandbags are credited with saving the saturated barrier, and with it the neighborhood behind it. The History Center's flood record gives the crest at 26.93 feet, just under the 1913 record of 27.1; the Allen County Genealogical Society's flood page gives 25.93 feet. The foot between the two records is printed as a bracket, because the record in hand does not settle it. What followed is documentary: in July 1982 the city's Ordinance S-82-07-23 authorized agreements with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to rehabilitate the flood control dike system, the Pemberton dike among the works named.
The park on the flood ground: The long answer to the floods was not only higher levees. In the wake of the disasters, as the Floods marker puts it, plans for allowing flood water to wash across the great bend in the St. Marys River assumed increasing importance, and Headwaters Park, the greenway's downtown anchor, was broken ground on 26 October 1993 with the Fort Wayne Bicentennial Commission acknowledging the cooperation of the whole of "the City That Saved Itself." A generation later the riverfront works joined the trail directly: Promenade Park, opened in 2019 on the St. Marys after the Riverfront Fort Wayne initiative that followed Mayor Tom Henry's making riverfront development a city priority in 2011, was designed at once to reduce flood risk and to connect the urban center to the riverfront, and it connects to the Rivergreenway.
The other direction: The partnership still runs both ways. A river trail is closed when the river rises, and the city posts trail closures and detours as routine business; the greenway's users learn the flood gauges the way the sandbaggers learned the dikes. The full flood record stands in DISASTERS. Here it is enough that no Fort Wayne trail along a river can be understood apart from the works that keep the river off the city, because so much of the trail literally stands on them.
Sources:
- The Floods historical marker, Headwaters Park (the fourteen-foot average before dikes, the 1913 rise, the Headwaters groundbreaking of 26 October 1993).
- Education Week, "Those Kids Beat Back the River," 21 March 1982 (the 13 March flood, the 9,000 evacuees, the children's crusade, the Pemberton Dike).
- The History Center, flood water can record, 1982 (the crest at 26.93 feet; the 30,000 sandbaggers); Allen County Genealogical Society, Floods in Allen County (the crest at 25.93 feet).
- City of Fort Wayne Ordinance S-82-07-23 (the Army Corps dike rehabilitation agreements, July 1982).
- Urban Land Institute, Promenade Park case study (the 1980s levees, the 2011 riverfront initiative, the 2019 opening).