Fort Wayne Wars, Unrest and Disasters: Rosters and Records

Wars, Unrest & Disasters · the systematic record

This section is the systematic companion to the rest of the Fort Wayne record. The deep narratives — Harmar's defeat, the 1812 siege, the great floods, the blizzard of 1978, the shooting of Vernon Jordan — are told at full length in the Story, the Events record, and Major Events, and are cross-referenced here in a line rather than retold. What this section holds is the complete roster underneath them: every war's Fort Wayne chapter in order, every regiment and company the county raised, every battle fought on its ground in roster form, the labor record whole, civil unrest exactly as far as the record shows it and no further, and the natural-disaster roster as the official recorders — the National Weather Service, the Storm Prediction Center, FEMA and the city's own flood office — keep it. Where the sources disagree on a number, both numbers stand. Where the record shows an absence — a riot that did not happen here, a casualty total that was never compiled — the absence is stated plainly, because an honest gap is part of the record too.

Before the fort · the actions at Kekionga, 1763–1794

ROSTER · THE GROUND BEFORE THE CITY

Fort Wayne's ground was fought over for a generation before the fort that named the city was built. The actions, in order:

June 1763 — Pontiac's War. Ensign Robert Holmes, the British officer at the small post among the Miami towns, was ambushed and killed with his party, and the post passed into Native hands — the only British-era action on this ground.

October–November 1780 — La Balme's raid. A detachment under the French officer Augustin de La Balme, marching for the American cause, raided and plundered the British trading post at Kekionga, then was caught and destroyed on the Eel River on 5 November 1780 by Little Turtle's Eel River band, acting with Kekionga's permission; La Balme was killed.

19 October 1790 — Hardin's defeat. A militia detachment under Colonel John Hardin, sent from Harmar's army against Little Turtle's town on the Eel River, was ambushed and cut up. The full account is in Major Events.

21–22 October 1790 — Harmar's defeat. The main action of the first United States expedition against Kekionga, fought at the town itself. The deep account, with the three casualty counts the sources give and do not reconcile, is in Major Events.

4 November 1791 — St. Clair's defeat. The second army sent against Kekionga was destroyed on the upper Wabash at what is now Fort Recovery, Ohio. It is rostered here because Kekionga was its objective — but it was not fought on Fort Wayne's ground, and the record says so. The deep account is in Major Events.

20 August 1794 — Fallen Timbers. Anthony Wayne's victory, fought near present Maumee, Ohio — again not on this ground, and again rostered because of what it built: in October 1794 Wayne raised the fort at the confluence of the St. Marys and St. Joseph that gave the city its name.

Sources: the campaign record as carried in the Story and Major Events; Indiana Historical Bureau marker texts; the county histories.

The War of 1812 · the siege in roster form

5–12 SEPTEMBER 1812 · FORT WAYNE

The week's siege of the fort is told at depth in the Story and Major Events. The order of battle, as the sources give it:

The garrison. About 70 soldiers — a detachment of the 1st U.S. Infantry, whose lineage is carried today by battalions of the 3rd Infantry — with some civilians. Captain James Rhea had commanded the post since 15 May 1810. Rhea was incapacitated through much of the siege, and the defense was carried in practice by his lieutenants, Philip Ostrander and Daniel Curtis. Only two soldiers were killed in the siege, on the accounting of the siege's modern scholarly treatment.

The besiegers. About 500 Potawatomi and Miami warriors under the chiefs Winamac and Five Medals. Two members of the garrison were killed by warriors in the attack that opened the siege, and the village around the fort was burned.

The relief. Governor William Henry Harrison, newly made a major general of the Kentucky militia, organized 2,200 militia at Newport Barracks and marched north; on 8 September, at Shane's Crossing on the St. Marys River, he was joined by 800 Ohio militia under Colonels Adams and Hawkins. The standard accounts therefore put the relief army at about 3,000 men; a Ball State University exhibit on the siege says nearly 5,000. The counts disagree and both stand. During a lull in the fighting, a small scouting party — the Fort Wayne settler William Oliver and the Shawnee captain Logan — slipped through the besiegers and into the fort. Winamac withdrew on 12 September ahead of the relief. Harrison arrested Rhea, who resigned his commission rather than face court martial, and placed Lieutenant Ostrander in command.

The aftermath. On 14 September Harrison sent out two punitive columns from Fort Wayne: a detachment of the 17th Infantry and mounted rifles under Colonel Samuel Wells against the Potawatomi villages of Five Medals, and two Kentucky regiments under Brigadier General John Payne against the Miami villages at the forks of the Wabash. In December 1812, Campbell's expedition against the Mississinewa towns staged from Fort Wayne.

Sources: the siege narratives and order-of-battle compilations summarised in the Story and Major Events; Ball State University's Forts of Fort Wayne exhibit (Potterf, "The Siege of Fort Wayne"); the Fort Wayne Garrison Orderly Book as transcribed in Griswold, Fort Wayne: Gateway of the West, 1802–1813 (1927).

The Mexican War · the two Fort Wayne companies

1846–1848 · THE 1ST AND 5TH INDIANA

Fort Wayne answered the first call for volunteers with two full companies. On 1 June 1846 they marched in procession to the lower lock and left by canal — by the Miami Canal to Cincinnati, then on to New Albany — and on 20 June 1846 they were mustered in as Companies E and F of the 1st Indiana Volunteers, Colonel James P. Drake commanding.

Company E, the "Mad Anthony Guards": Captain John McLain; First Lieutenant Thomas Lewis; Second Lieutenants Charles Colerick and George Humphrey. Company F, the "Wayne Guards": Captain David W. Lewis; First Lieutenant Brad B. Stevens; Second Lieutenants Samuel H. Chapman and William Hunter.

Their service, on the county history's account, was guard duty near the mouth of the Rio Grande — much marching, no fighting — and they came home in 1847. On the second call, Fort Wayne raised Company K of the 5th Indiana (Colonel James H. Lane), commanded again by Captain David W. Lewis, with Lieutenants Thomas K. Lewis, John B. Sawtell and Ira G. Williamson; it was mustered in at Madison on 6 January 1848, did frontier guard duty, and was mustered out on 28 July 1848.

The lineage matters to the city's present: the 1st Battalion, 293rd Infantry, Fort Wayne's own Guard battalion, traces its lineage to the 1st Regiment of 1846. The battalion's lineage honors associate the regiment with service under General Taylor at Buena Vista; the contemporary Allen County history records the two Fort Wayne companies themselves on guard duty at the Rio Grande with no fighting. Both statements stand — the county account covers the companies, and this section does not merge them.

Sources: Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana, from Indiana in the Mexican War, the History of Allen County, and Valley of the Upper Maumee, vol. 2, p. 391; the 1-293rd Infantry lineage record.

The Civil War · the full roster

1861–1865 · CAMP ALLEN AND THE COUNTY'S REGIMENTS

Fort Wayne's Civil War camp was Camp Allen, on the west bank of the St. Marys off West Main Street, where thousands of the county's soldiers received, in the History Center's words, the bulk of their preparation and training. The Indiana Historical Bureau's marker at the site (ID 02.1963.1, erected 1963) reads: "Civil War Mustering-In Camp. Colonel Hugh B. Reed served as first Commandant. Here the 30th, 44th, 74th, 88th, and 100th Indiana Regiments and the 11th Indiana Battery were organized." The Bureau's 2010 review of the marker adds that the 142nd Indiana was recruited in July 1864 and rendezvoused at Fort Wayne — likely at Camp Allen — and notes that the marker's own "1861–64" span is not itself provable. Both the marker and its review stand in this record.

The organizations, as a contemporary newspaper account of the camp gives them: the 30th Indiana organized 20 August 1861 under Colonel Sion S. Bass; the 44th on 22 November 1861 under Colonel Hugh B. Reed; the 74th in 1862 under Colonel Thomas Morgan; the 88th in the summer of 1862 under Colonel George Humphrey; the 100th under Colonel Sanford J. Stoughton; and the 11th Battery in 1862. Colonel Bass, a prominent Fort Wayne resident and the 30th's first colonel, was killed at Shiloh in April 1862.

Regiments and batteries with companies formed in Allen County, or with many Allen County men (the county genealogical society's roster): 5th Cavalry (90th Regiment), Company D · 8th Infantry (reorganized), Company G · 9th Infantry, Company E · 11th Cavalry, Company C · 11th Infantry (reorganized), Company H · 12th Cavalry, Company I · 12th Infantry, Companies F and G, and (reorganized) B, G and K · 13th Cavalry, Company G · 13th Infantry (reorganized), Companies D and K · 14th Battery, Light Artillery · 15th Infantry, Company C · 30th Infantry, Companies A and D, and (reorganized) A and E · 35th Infantry, Company C · 38th Infantry, Companies H and K. Beyond those, the county's Memorial Record of Allen County Soldiers (c. 1905) places Allen County men in the 11th, 13th, 17th, 22nd, 29th, 32nd (the "1st German," Company A), 33rd, 55th (three-months), 59th, 73rd, 75th, 91st, 124th, 126th (11th Cavalry), 127th (12th Cavalry), 128th, 129th, 131st (13th Cavalry), 137th, 139th, 142nd, 152nd and 155th Indiana, in the 19th U.S. Infantry, and in the 23rd Battery.

The county's own battery. The 11th Battery, Indiana Light Artillery — Sutermeister's Battery, after its first commander, organized at Fort Wayne with men like First Lieutenant John Otto among its organizers — was the city's own artillery, and the city supported it throughout the war. Two hundred forty-one men served in the battery over the course of the war; twenty-nine gave their lives and forty-one were discharged with disabilities. Overrun in Longstreet's attack at Chickamauga, it lost thirteen men wounded, four killed and three captured. It fired more than three thousand rounds against Atlanta. Over the war its men traveled some eight hundred miles by rail, more than four hundred by steamboat, and about seven hundred by horse, mule and foot. Allen County paid out, a few dollars at a time, more than $73,000 in relief to soldiers' families.

The totals, as the sources give them — and they give them differently. The inscription on the county's Grand Army of the Republic memorial states that not less than 4,103 men went from this county. The History Center's modern summary puts it higher: Allen County, out of a population of nearly 30,000, sent over 5,000 men into service, of whom 489 lost their lives. The two served counts are not reconciled in the sources and both stand; the 489 is the only county death total the record carries. No other official county death total for the war was found.

Henry W. Lawton. The county's most famous soldier entered the service at Fort Wayne on 15 April 1861 as a sergeant in Company E, 9th Indiana (three-months); he rose to lieutenant colonel of the 30th Indiana, was awarded the Medal of Honor, and after the war captured Geronimo. He was killed at San Mateo in the Philippines on 19 December 1899. Lawton Park — renamed for him in 1900, North Side Park before — holds the county's Civil War monument, its inscription a "Tribute for patriotic citizens of Allen County who fell in defense of the Union 1861–1865," naming Chickamauga, Vicksburg and Gettysburg; his statue stands in Lakeside Park. The monument's dedication date is itself given two ways: the Historical Society's 1964 guide says 20 April 1893; the History Center's account says 10 October 1894. Both stand.

The last veteran — a correction the record itself makes. A plaque dedicated 30 May 1941 honored John Townsend Young, of the 152nd Indiana, as the last surviving Civil War veteran in Allen County. The correction, on the record of the county genealogical society and the Sons of Union Veterans: Young was not the last. Richard Gottlieb Foss, who served in Company A, 16th Pennsylvania Cavalry and died 21 January 1945, was the last Civil War veteran buried in Allen County. The Pennsylvania roster lists him as “Foss, Gotleib,” mustered 29 January 1864; he was wounded at Hatcher's Run on 6 February 1865 and died aged 100.

Sources: Indiana Historical Bureau, Camp Allen marker 02.1963.1 and its 2010 review; Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana — Civil War information for Allen County, the units roster, and the Memorial Record of Allen County Soldiers; the History Center (Castaldi, "Allen County in the Civil War"); Indiana Historical Society journal study of the 11th Battery; the Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society's 1964 markers guide.

The Spanish-American War · two companies, a war spent in camp

1898 · THE 157TH INDIANA

Fort Wayne's Spanish-American War regiment was the 157th Indiana Volunteer Infantry — the 3rd Regiment of the Indiana National Guard under a federal number — mustered in on 10 May 1898 under Colonel George M. Studebaker. Two of its companies were Fort Wayne companies: Company B, Captain Charles E. Reese, First Lieutenant John B. Fonner, Second Lieutenant Wm. W. Kerr; and Company G, Captain O. C. Meyer, First Lieutenant W. S. McLeod, Second Lieutenant J. C. Jackson.

The regiment's war was a tour of camps: Camp Mount at Indianapolis from 26 April 1898, then Camp Thomas at Chickamauga (17 May), Port Tampa City (3 June), Fernandina (30 July), and back to Indianapolis on 2 September. The men were furloughed on 10 September and mustered out on 1 November 1898. The 157th never left the United States — disease in the camps, not Spanish fire, was its enemy. The regiment's memorial roll asterisks one death at Port Tampa on 20 July 1898, printed adjacent to the Company F (South Bend) listing; this section does not assign that death to a Fort Wayne company, because the roll as consulted does not. The city's Spanish War monument, and the Philippine gun monument in Lawton Park, carry the war's memory in the park record.

Sources: Indiana Historical Bureau, 157th Regiment organizational chart; the regiment's memorial roll.

The First World War · Battery D and the county's war

1917–1918 · THE 150TH FIELD ARTILLERY

Fort Wayne went to France as artillery. Two batteries of the 150th Field Artillery — Batteries B and D — were Fort Wayne batteries, serving in the 42nd "Rainbow" Division under Colonel Robert Tyndall through six major engagements; the division went overseas in October 1917, and the county's Gold Star entries give Battery D's embarkation as 18 October 1917. Fort Wayne's Guard infantry company — Company E, 1st Infantry, Indiana National Guard — was folded into Battery D for the war, and Battery D had already served on the Mexican border in July 1916. The county's service was catalogued almost as it happened: Isabelle H. Taylor's History of Allen County in the World War (1920) holds some 3,500 Allen County service records.

The county's dead are recorded name by name in the state's Gold Star Honor Roll, whose Allen County section fills pages 18 to 39 of the state volume; the county genealogical society's summary of the roll is "over 100." The names include Private Leslie C. Kayser of Battery D, dead of measles and pneumonia on 23 November 1917, among the first Allen County men to die on foreign soil; Private Albert Brintzenhofe, who went from Company E into Battery D and was killed by shellfire on 10 August 1918 near Dôle; Corporal James Eby, killed 10 October 1918 at Montfaucon; and Grace Glenn Buell, a Red Cross nurse who died of pneumonia on 8 October 1918 at Base Hospital No. 33, Portsmouth, England. General Electric's employee memorial at McCullough Park on Broadway lists the company's own war dead.

The county built its memory in stone: Memorial Park is the county's memorial to this war, and the World War Veterans Monument there, dedicated 12 November 1928, carries on bronze tablets inside its marble arches the names of all the county's soldiers, sailors, marines and nurses who died. The combined roll of honor at the Memorial Coliseum — the First and Second World Wars together — is given in the Second World War chapter below.

Sources: the Indiana Gold Star Honor Roll (Allen County section); the Allen County Genealogical Society's 20th-Century Veterans Honor Roll and service entries; Taylor, History of Allen County in the World War (1920); the Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society's 1964 markers guide.

The Second World War · Baer Field and the county's war

1941–1945 · THE FIELD, THE PLANTS, THE ROLL OF HONOR

Fort Wayne's Second World War had an airfield at its center. Baer Field was built in 1941 for some $10 million and named for First Lieutenant Paul Baer, a Fort Wayne native and First World War ace credited with 16 victories in the wing's own fact sheet. The Army's 31st Pursuit Group arrived at Baer Field on 6 December 1941 — the day before Pearl Harbor; that story is told in Major Events. The 358th Fighter Group, a P-47 Thunderbolt outfit, was also present at Baer Field in the 1943–45 period, and the Air National Guard's fact sheet describes the wartime field as a C-47 maintenance center through which most of the C-47s flown in the Normandy invasion passed — stated here as the Guard's own claim. The plants that made the city's war — General Electric, Magnavox, International Harvester and the rest — are rostered company by company in the Business record; GE's employee memorial on Broadway names the company's dead of both wars.

The county's dead of the two world wars are carried together on one roll. When the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum was proposed in 1944 by the Junior Chamber of Commerce as a memorial to the county's dead of both world wars — cornerstone laid November 1951 — the Memorial Hall roll of honor was compiled from War Department records and published in both of the city's newspapers so that families could correct it before it was cast. As compiled, the roll carried 643 names for the First and Second World Wars combined, and the total has since been increased by the casualties of the Korean conflict. That is the figure as its own history states it: 643 belongs to the two wars together, and no sourced split of it by war was found — this section does not invent one. A county total for the number who served in the Second World War likewise was not found;.

Sources: Otto H. Adams, The Allen County War Memorial Coliseum (Public Library of Fort Wayne and Allen County, 1953; Project Gutenberg no. 65372); 122nd Fighter Wing public-affairs fact sheet; the Story and Major Events for the 31st Pursuit Group.

Korea, Vietnam, and the wars since · the county's names

1950–PRESENT · WHAT THE ROLLS CARRY, AND WHAT THEY DON'T

Korea. The county's Korean War service is held in a veterans list compiled as of 1 August 1956, and the Korean War Veterans Association's memorial stands at Concordia Gardens Cemetery in Fort Wayne. The Coliseum roll was increased by the conflict's casualties even as its history was being written in 1953. Individual Fort Wayne dead are on the honor roll — Private Richard Albert Chandler, killed in action, among them — but no official county death total for Korea was found. The settling sources are the state's Korean War casualty lists and the National Archives file.

Vietnam. The county's Vietnam dead are recorded name by name in the genealogical society's honor roll and in the News-Sentinel's accounting of 30 April 2015, "Fort Wayne Vietnam War Deaths," published on the fortieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. The documented dead in the sources read for this section include Lance Corporal Donald Alan Chaffin, USMC (24 February 1967); Lance Corporal Terry Lee Fuhrman, USMC (14 April 1968); Lance Corporal Major Arnold Jr., USMC (24 August 1965); Sergeant Wilbur Lewis Gray Jr. (2 March 1968); Specialist Four William Stanley Kleint (14 March 1968); Specialist Four Kurtis Aurel Berry (6 July 1969); and Lance Corporal David Alan Dennis (12 November 1968). A group of Fort Wayne-area Marines of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines — Privates First Class Joseph Klemenus, Layne Clifton and James Anderson among them — were killed in the Hill 881 fights of 24 April to 12 May 1967, and a memorial service for the Hill 881 dead was held on 17 May 1967. No consolidated official county total for the Vietnam dead was published in the sources consulted; the settling sources are the National Archives casualty file sorted by home county and the Coliseum's Memorial Hall list, and the gap is logged rather than filled.

The wars since 1990. Fort Wayne's part in the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan was carried principally by its two Guard organizations, whose chapters follow. Individual county deaths in those wars are recorded name by name in the honor rolls and the city's newspapers; no official consolidated county total was found, and none is stated.

Sources: Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana, 20th-Century Allen County Veterans Honor Roll; News-Sentinel, 30 April 2015; Adams, The Allen County War Memorial Coliseum (1953).

The 122nd Fighter Wing · the Blacksnakes

1946–PRESENT · BAER FIELD'S OWN WING

The wing's lineage runs back to the Second World War's 358th Fighter Group. The 122nd Tactical Fighter Group was formed on 9 December 1946 at Stout Field, Indianapolis, and its 163rd Fighter Squadron was federally recognized at Baer Field on 10 November 1947, under Major William R. Sefton, flying F-51 Mustangs. The wing was federalized for the Korean conflict in 1951–52; the lineage record consulted notes that while portions of the wing were activated, none from Baer Field served overseas. Wing headquarters moved to Baer Field in 1954. The jets followed in sequence: the F-80 in September 1954, then the F-86, the F-84F in January 1958, the F-100 in June 1971, the F-4C Phantom on 18 November 1979 and the F-4E in 1985.

Its deployments are the city's modern war record. For the Berlin Crisis, the wing was federally activated from October 1961 to August 1962 and deployed to Chambley Air Base, France, under the 17th Air Force. In Desert Storm (January–June 1991), its Security Police went to Saudi Arabia — the wing's first combat-zone activation — and its Tactical Hospital element to Tyndall Air Force Base. The F-16C arrived from 17 July 1991 and the wing was redesignated the 122nd Fighter Wing in 1992. Its air expeditionary rotations sent about 250 airmen in 2000 and again in 2001 (Southern Watch over Iraq), 345 in 2004, 305 in 2006 and 345 in 2007, the later rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan. Conversion to the A-10C began 10 September 2010 and was completed in June 2012; the 122nd Expeditionary Fighter Squadron's deployment to Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates was completed in October 2012, and the wing's first A-10 combat deployment — some 300 airmen for six months to Afghanistan — followed in October 2014. Under the fiscal 2023 defense act (signed 23 December 2022) the wing gave up its 21 A-10s for the F-16 Block 40, a conversion completed by 2026. The wing's present-day record is carried in Fort Wayne Today.

Sources: 122nd Fighter Wing public-affairs fact sheets and unit lineage records; Indiana Air National Guard histories.

The 1-293rd Infantry · the Nightfighters

1947–PRESENT · HEADQUARTERS AND COMPANY B, FORT WAYNE

The 1st Battalion, 293rd Infantry — the "Nightfighters," of the 76th Mobile Brigade Combat Team, 38th Infantry Division — was organized in 1947 with its headquarters at Fort Wayne, where Headquarters Company and Company B remain. Its lineage reaches back through the 157th's parent regiment and the Civil War companies to the 1846 1st Indiana of the Mexican War chapter above.

Elements of the battalion served in Bosnia on the SFOR rotation in 2002. Its Iraq record is two full tours. 2003: mobilized in late November 2002 at Camp Atterbury, the main body reached Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, on 2 January 2003; on the fifth day of the ground war it moved north to Tallil Air Base near Nasiriyah — with Company A of the 1-152nd Infantry attached — and ran airfield and prisoner-of-war-camp security, exchanging fire in the course of it. The battalion was awarded Combat Infantryman Badges, an event Stars and Stripes recorded on 30 July 2003; a narration at a later unit ceremony calls it the first Guard battalion-sized element to earn the badge since the Korean War, and that claim is stated here as the unit's own. More than 600 soldiers came home to a welcome at the Memorial Coliseum on 17 October 2003. 2008: with the 76th Brigade — some 3,400 soldiers, billed as Indiana's largest Guard deployment since the Second World War — the 1-293rd served at Joint Base Balad under the 55th Sustainment Brigade, running convoy security across central Iraq; 39 women deployed with the battalion. It returned in December 2008. (A transfer-of-authority narration in circulation garbles these dates, speaking of an October 2004 call-up "in support of OIF I"; this section follows the Stars and Stripes, Journal Gazette and brigade record.)

Sources: Stars and Stripes, 30 July 2003; the Journal Gazette (homecoming, 17 October 2003; the battalion's women, 25 February 2008); 76th Infantry Brigade Combat Team deployment history; Combat Studies Institute interview record.

The labor record begins · 1863–1864

THE RAILROAD MEN ORGANIZE, THEN STRIKE

Fort Wayne was a railroad town, and its labor history starts with the railroads. In 1863 the railroad men formed the city's first organized labor body — an organizer named Fincher planted it, and the printers followed — and in 1864 they struck. The Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago Railway had announced that wages would be paid in company warrants instead of national currency, and the shopmen and trainmen walked out: the strike ran for weeks, every Fort Wayne shop department closed, some 400 men stood idle, and troops were sent from Pittsburgh to guard company property. Five hundred strikers paraded in order on the division superintendent, H. A. Gardner, with their terms: engineers' pay from $75 to $90 a month, firemen's from $35 to $45, and the engineers' runs cut from more than a hundred miles to 72–80 miles a day. Griswold's Pictorial History gives the strike its chapter (chapter XXXIX), and the wage figures here are his.

Sources: Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, chapter XXXIX and its chapter sequence, via the county genealogical society's extracts.

1877 · the great railroad strike comes to Fort Wayne

JULY 1877 · "THE GREATEST INDUSTRIAL UPHEAVAL"

The national railroad strike of 1877 — the Great Upheaval that began on the Baltimore & Ohio and shut down rail lines across the country — reached Fort Wayne. Griswold, who devoted part of his history to the city's strikes of 1869–79, calls 1877 "the greatest industrial upheaval in the history of Fort Wayne." The Nation, in its issue of 26 July 1877, listed Fort Wayne among the places where crowds compelled the stoppage of work at factories and mills. Beyond that, the local chapter's full detail — which shops closed, for how long, and whether troops came in 1877 as they had in 1864 — sits in Griswold's own 1877 text, the settling source for those questions.

Sources: Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (the 1877 characterization); The Nation, 26 July 1877.

The street railway strikes · 1891–1916

THE TRACTION MEN

Griswold gives the street railway men's strike of the 1891–94 years its own chapter (chapter XLV, "Strike of Street Railway Men"). The long strike on the fuller record is the walkout against the Fort Wayne & Northern Indiana Traction Company, which ran from October 1915 to 12 May 1916. Ahead of the planned 1 October 1915 start, a federal court issued a temporary restraining order against the Amalgamated Association organizer Joseph Colgan (the case of U.S. Mortgage & Trust Co. v. Colgan) — a detail that rests on a family-preserved newspaper photograph and is flagged here for exactly that reason. The company reported a deficit of some $32,000 for the year, due largely to the strike. By the record that survives, the strike saw little violence, and the public backed the men with a widespread boycott of the cars.

Sources: Griswold, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, chapter XLV; the traction company's reporting and the Colgan court item as preserved and flagged above.

The sit-down era and the 1946 GE strike

1936–1946 · THE NATIONAL WAVES, THE LOCAL PLANTS

General Motors' own corporate histories list Fort Wayne among the plants to which the 1936–37 sit-down strike spread from Flint, and record that in the outlying plants — Fort Wayne's among them — the shutdowns were peaceful; the strike ended on 11 February 1937 with GM's recognition of the United Auto Workers. No plant-level Fort Wayne account of the sit-down was found, and none is reconstructed here.

The 1946 strike at General Electric is documented to the courtroom. In General Electric Co. v. Gojack, 68 F. Supp. 686 (N.D. Ind., Fort Wayne Division, decided 5 March 1946), the federal court recorded the shape of it: the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (CIO) struck GE's plants nationwide beginning 15 January 1946, and the Fort Wayne factories and the Decatur works were both in the case. Twice, at both Fort Wayne and Decatur, massed picket lines blocked non-striking employees — mostly executives and supervisors carrying letters of identification — from entering the plants; Fort Wayne police were present at the Fort Wayne attempts. Between 1,000 and 1,100 employees at the two works were not represented by the union. The case was GE's bid for injunctions under the Norris-LaGuardia Act, and its recital of facts is the fullest contemporary account of the strike at the Fort Wayne plants that the record holds.

Two later chapters are cross-referenced rather than retold: the 172-day United Auto Workers strike against International Harvester in 1979–80, whose Fort Wayne chapter is told at depth in Major Events; and the 1981 PATCO strike, whose documented Fort Wayne footprint is small and specific — the Federal Aviation Administration's control tower at Smith Field, the city's north-side airport, closed in 1981 during the strike. No Fort Wayne-specific record of controllers at Baer Field was found.

Sources: General Motors corporate history (the sit-down strike's spread and settlement); General Electric Co. v. Gojack, 68 F. Supp. 686 (N.D. Ind. 1946); the Smith Field tower record; Major Events for the Harvester strike.

The Klan years · 1921–1928

THE SECOND KLAN IN FORT WAYNE

Indiana was the second Ku Klux Klan's strongest state, and Fort Wayne had its chapter of that history — with the size of it stated from the membership rolls, not the Klan's own boasts. Historian Leonard Moore, working from the Klan's actual rosters for Citizen Klansmen, counted about 2,100 male members in Allen County through the 1920s — roughly seven percent of the eligible population, one of the lowest percentages in Indiana. The Klan's paper, The Fiery Cross, claimed far more, and the two kinds of numbers are not the same kind of evidence.

The visible record: cross burnings were reported in Fort Wayne from the Christmas season of 1922. Through the winter and spring of 1923 the Fort Wayne News and Sentinel reported the local membership drive ("Take Many into the Klan Here," 3 February 1923) while its editor, Jesse Greene, used the paper against the organization — he had condemned its "intolerance, prejudice and hatred" for two years before his death in 1923, and the Indiana Magazine of History's study of Greene credits his stand with helping slow the Klan's local rise. On 28 April 1923 the Fort Wayne Klan paraded in full regalia behind a brass band, over the public opposition of Mayor William J. Hosey, who had said he would not permit it: the board of public safety ruled the mayor's ban illegal, the chief of police gave permission, and Hosey put every city officer on duty to keep order instead. The city's Black community organized against it in the same years — the Fort Wayne NAACP branch reported 500 members by November 1923.

The set piece was the statewide gathering of 10 November 1923, for which the Klan announced 100,000 coming to Fort Wayne. The New York Times counted the invasion at about 5,000 — "ONLY 5,000 OF KLAN INVADE FORT WAYNE" — and reported Imperial Wizard Hiram W. Evans dropping his customary denunciations of races and sects to plead for peace. A photograph of Klansmen gathered at the Main Street Interurban Terminal in 1926, held by the Allen County Public Library, shows the organization still meeting in public late in its run, two years after Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson's 1925 murder conviction broke the Indiana Klan's power. The local chapter's klavern number and surviving membership roll were not found.

One famous Klan fight of the era does not belong to this city and is excluded here on purpose: the May 1924 brawl between Notre Dame students and Klansmen happened in South Bend, where the Klan kept its headquarters at 230 South Michigan Street. A widely shared 2026 explainer video placed that fight on a "Fort Wayne Street" in Fort Wayne; the street was South Bend's, and the video corrected itself. It is a South Bend story, told in that city's record.

Sources: Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (the roster count); Indiana Magazine of History 113 (December 2017), the Jesse Greene study; The Fiery Cross and the Fort Wayne News and Sentinel, 1923; The Imperial Night-Hawk, 1923 (the April parade); New York Times, 10 November 1923; Kathleen Blee / James H. Madison, The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland (the 1922 cross burnings); Allen County Public Library Digital Collections (the 1926 photograph).

The 1960s · what the record shows

AN HONEST ABSENCE, AND ONE AUGUST NIGHT

Fort Wayne did not have a major riot in the 1960s, and this section says so plainly rather than implying one. The searches run for this record — the county genealogical society's 1960s timeline, the standard national accounts — show no Detroit-scale uprising here in 1967 and no riot after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968; Gary, Indiana, had one that April. Fort Wayne did not. What the county timeline shows for that spring is Robert F. Kennedy campaigning in the city on 10 and 23 April 1968.

What is documented — by a national historian working from the records — is smaller and specific. Elizabeth Hinton, in America on Fire (2021), writes: "In Fort Wayne in August 1968, just before the school year began, a dozen Black teenagers started a rebellion at the McCulloch Recreation Center, where kids in the segregated Southeast side of the city often gathered. At around eleven o'clock, a Parks Department officer intruded on their evening ('a fight was reported') and asked the group to disperse. The youths ignored him. They bent down and picked up stones and debris from the Center's lawn to throw." Hinton also preserves the response of the city's mayor — Harold S. Zeis held the office, 1964–1971, on the Government record — "We don't know why it started." That is the documented civil unrest of Fort Wayne's 1960s: one night, a dozen teenagers, stones at a recreation center on the segregated side of town, and a mayor who said he did not know why. The record carries it at that size.

Sources: Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s (2021); Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana, 1960s timeline of Allen County; the Government record (the Zeis administration).

2020 · the George Floyd protests

29–30 MAY 2020 · TEAR GAS AT THE COURTHOUSE

On 29 and 30 May 2020, hundreds of Fort Wayne residents gathered downtown at the Allen County Courthouse to protest the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. On both days, Fort Wayne police fired tear gas into the crowds to disperse them. The Journal Gazette's count was 97 people arrested over the two days. Allen County Prosecutor Karen Richards prosecuted 50 of those arrested and dropped charges against 45 others, the Associated Press reported.

One injury made the city a national story. Balin Brake, 21, of Fort Wayne, was struck in the face by a tear-gas canister on 30 May; the impact ruptured his right eye, which surgeons removed. He was one of eight people across the United States partially blinded by police projectiles on that single day. The accounts of how he was hit conflict, and both stand in this record: the Fort Wayne Police Department said Brake had bent over to pick up a canister, presumably to throw it back, when a second canister was deployed, bounced, and struck his eye; the Washington Post's slow-motion video analysis, published 15 July 2020, found that the video shows neither the bending nor the bounce. The ACLU of Indiana sued the city and the officer identified in the case, Justin Holmes, in federal court; the litigation settled in March 2022. The story ran on the Associated Press wire and in the Post's national investigation of protest eye injuries — a Fort Wayne dateline the whole country read.

Sources: Associated Press, 5 October 2020 and August 2020 (the arrests and the prosecutions); Washington Post, 15 July 2020 (the partial-blindings investigation); Reason, 14 May 2021 (the suit and the qualified-immunity fight); Physicians for Human Rights, "Lethal in Disguise" case study (the March 2022 settlement); the Journal Gazette via Input Fort Wayne (the 97 arrests).

National news datelines · the cross-references

WHAT THE NATION READ WITH A FORT WAYNE DATELINE

The deepest of the city's national-news stories is told at full length in Major Events and cross-referenced here in its line: on 29 May 1980 the civil-rights leader Vernon Jordan was shot in a Fort Wayne motel parking lot; President Carter's hospital visit on 1 June 1980 led the first broadcast of a new network called CNN; the gunman, Joseph Paul Franklin, was acquitted in federal court in 1982, admitted the shooting in 1996, and was executed in 2013. The 2020 blinding of Balin Brake, told in full in the unrest record above, is the other Fort Wayne story of the era that ran nationally. The city's crime record proper — its trials, cases and notorious names — has its own file in this record and is not duplicated here. Other candidates checked and excluded include the two that matter most, because both are routinely attached to this city and neither happened here: the 1924 Notre Dame–Klan fight (South Bend, treated in the Klan chapter above) and the "Fort Wayne flood of 1936" (treated in the floods chapter below).

Floods · the recorder's roster

1828–PRESENT · THREE RIVERS, ONE CONFLUENCE

Fort Wayne floods because it exists: three rivers meet in it, and the Maumee's flood stage at the city is 15 feet. The city Flood Control Department keeps a Chronological List of Floods running back to January 1828. FEMA names the four greatest Fort Wayne floods of the modern record: 1913, 1978, 1982 and 1985. The recurrence is the story underneath the events — on the city's Repetitive Loss Plan (Ordinance R-91-11-16, 1991, built on FEMA's 1990 Flood Insurance Study), since records began in 1907 the Maumee had reached flood stage in all but eight years, with 28 major-flood years in that span, and four of the five largest floods on record had occurred since 1978. The deep narratives of 1913, 1978 and 1982 are told in the Events record and Major Events; this is the roster they sit in.

The crest tables, National Weather Service. Maumee River at Fort Wayne: No. 1, 26.10 feet, 26 March 1913; No. 2, 25.93 feet, 17 March 1982; No. 5, 23.76 feet, 24 March 1978; the highest since 1990 is 23.9 feet, 1 January 1991; the river reached 23.58 feet on 13 March 2009. St. Marys River: 21.20 feet on 9 July 2003, the gage record; 19.66 feet, 14 March 1982; 19.06, 14 January 2005; 18.33, 26 February 1985; 17.92, 1 January 1991; 16.98, 11 March 2009. St. Joseph River: its record is 22.00 feet, 26 March 1913. The return periods assigned in the flood studies: 1913 ran as a 500-year flood on the St. Joseph, beyond 500-year on the St. Marys, and a 50-year flood on the Maumee; 1982 as 140-, 35- and 80-year respectively. Other attested floods on the lists: 1876, discussed in Griswold; June 1981; March 2009. The city's wettest single day on the climate record brought 4.93 inches of rain.

A conflict that stands. The History Center's flood-can label gives 26.93 feet for the 1982 crest and 27.1 feet for 1913 — a full foot above the Weather Service series in both years. Major Events carries the same conflict; the two series are not reconciled in the sources, and both stand. An exclusion: the "Fort Wayne flood of 1936" sometimes attached to the city does not verify — it appears in none of the flood lists consulted (the Floods marker, the genealogical society's lists, FEMA, the USGS); Indiana's great flood of that era was the Ohio River flood of January 1937, and Fort Wayne's flood of record for the late 1970s is March 1978. The 1936 flood is excluded, and the exclusion is part of the record.

Sources: National Weather Service, Northern Indiana (the crest series and climate record); FEMA Flood Insurance Study (1990) and the February 1987 flood summary; City of Fort Wayne Repetitive Loss Plan and Flood Control Department chronology, via the Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana.

Tornadoes · the county roster

1950–2024 · THE SPC-ERA RECORD

The Storm Prediction Center's record, as the county trackers compile it, counts 32 tornadoes in Allen County from 1950 to 2024. The county's only tornado death in the modern record came from an F1 tornado in 1976 — one killed, none injured. The dated roster of the county's significant strikes, from the Tornado Project's compilation of the official record and the Weather Service's event pages:

19 July 1950 — F2 · 18 March 1953 — F2 · 11 May 1957 — F1 · 10 August 1971 — F2 · 1976 — F1, one killed · 8 October 1992 — F2, nine injured (6:00 p.m.; 20 yards wide, 2 miles) · 28 March 1998 — F1 · 26 May 2001 — F2, three injured (300 yards wide, 3.0 miles) · 26 October 2010 — an EF0 (1.2 miles) and an EF1 (7 miles) the same day · 24 August 2016 — EF3, from 3.7 miles northwest of Woodburn to 4.1 miles east of Harlan, 5:27–5:39 p.m. EDT, 500 yards wide over a path of about 5.2 miles, with a second Allen County tornado rated EF2 the same day; the EF3 is the strongest tornado in the county's modern record, in a 14-tornado outbreak · 31 March 2023 — two tornadoes, including an EF2 at 10:36 p.m. (7.9 miles long, 400 yards wide) · 29 July 2023 — one tornado, its rating not captured.

Palm Sunday, 11 April 1965. The great outbreak of that day is a Midwest story, and its Allen County chapter is a near miss: no tornado of that day appears in the dated county roster compiled for this section, and the nearest F4 tracked about 37 miles away. As resolved in Major Events, nothing stronger than an F2 touched Fort Wayne in that outbreak at all. Before 1950 the record thins: a Weather Service centennial list mentions an April 6 on which "a small tornado struck Fort Wayne," in its first-decade-of-the-1900s lines, but the year attribution is ambiguous in the source as consulted, and no year is stated here.

Sources: Storm Prediction Center severe-weather database as compiled in the county tornado trackers; the Tornado Project, Allen County, Indiana; National Weather Service, Northern Indiana, event pages (notably 24 August 2016 and 31 March 2023).

Winter · blizzards and ice

THE COLD SIDE OF THE RECORD

The Blizzard of 26–27 January 1978 is told at depth in the Events record. The county's greatest 24-hour snowfall is 13.6 inches, on 9–10 March 1964, on the Weather Service's record. The winter storm this section adds in full is the ice storm of 18–19 December 2008: freezing rain fell through the night of the 18th, and by Friday some 180,000 Indiana customers had lost power, with the Fort Wayne area particularly hard-hit (Associated Press). Four days in, some 53,000 outages remained in and around Fort Wayne, with winds over 30 mph hampering repairs; Indiana Michigan Power warned it could be Christmas Eve before Fort Wayne's power was fully restored, put its own storm damage at $10–12 million, and the city opened shelters at the Memorial Coliseum and South Side High School. Some customers were out a week. Two famous storms are excluded from this roster on the record: the Blizzard of January 1888 was an East Coast storm with no Fort Wayne chapter; and the Armistice Day storm of November 1940, whose destructive center tracked north of Indiana — no sourced Fort Wayne chapter was found, nor were locally sourced Fort Wayne figures for the January 1999 blizzard

Sources: National Weather Service, Northern Indiana (the 19 December 2008 winter storm page; the Indiana centennial snow records); Associated Press, 20 and 22 December 2008; Indiana Michigan Power storm updates via AroundFortWayne.

Heat, the derecho, and the rest of the sky

106 DEGREES, FOUR TIMES · 29 JUNE 2012

Fort Wayne's all-time record high is 106°F, reached four times: 22 July 1934, 14 July 1936, 25 June 1988 and 28 June 2012 (National Weather Service). The most days at 100° or above in a single year is eight, in 1934. The July 1936 heat wave — Fort Wayne at 104° on 8 and 13 July and 106° on the 14th — was the city's share of the statewide wave that set Indiana's all-time record of 116° at Collegeville and left a state death toll of at least 173. The summer of 2012 answered it: a record four straight days over 100° ending 7 July, six days over 100° in all, and a record 56 consecutive days at 80° or above, ending 8 August 2012, breaking the mark of 55 set in 1899. The all-time record low is −24°F, on 12 January 1918.

In the middle of that 2012 heat came the derecho of 29 June 2012. The measured gust at Fort Wayne International Airport was 91 mph — the highest official gust of the entire Ohio Valley and Mid-Atlantic derecho, on the Weather Service's service assessment. Damage was widespread and extensive in the Fort Wayne metro, which the national accounts name among the hardest-hit areas; across the storm's whole path 22 people were killed and more than 4.2 million customers lost power, in the heart of the heat wave above. Earthquakes close the roster with an absence: no damaging earthquake in Allen County verifies, and no specific dated Fort Wayne account of a felt earthquake was sourced — the county's seismic chapter is felt reports from regional events; its settling sources are the USGS event record and the county timelines.

Sources: National Weather Service, Northern Indiana (the Fort Wayne climate record and the 2012 heat statistics; the June 2012 derecho service assessment); Indiana Historical Bureau / county timeline (the July 1936 statewide toll).