Fort Wayne's Great Fortunes: Money Made, Kept and Given Away

Wealth: Fortunes Made, Kept, and Given Away

Fort Wayne's money has a shape, and it changes by era. The first fortunes were furs, treaty annuities, and land at the meeting of three rivers. The canal and the railroads turned land and banking paper into the second layer. Iron, wagon wheels, hosiery, beer, and meatpacking built the third. Insurance and banking built the fourth, quieter and larger than the rest, and a striking share of it came back to the city as foundations — by the early twenty-first century Fort Wayne's biggest pools of private wealth were not family bank accounts at all, but the Foellinger Foundation, the English-Bonter-Mitchell Foundation, and the Community Foundation, all spending old Fort Wayne fortunes on the city that made them. The newest fortunes — steel, music retail, handbags — are company fortunes again, and their giving is only beginning.

Every figure in this section is a figure somebody published: an estate valuation in a history or a newspaper, a capitalization in a city directory, a sale price in a company history, a foundation's own federal tax filing. Where no figure was ever published, this section says so rather than guessing. For people still living, it records only what is already public — company roles, published gifts, and the public filings of their foundations — and no estimate of any living person's net worth appears here, because no reputable publication has published one for them.

Part One: The Trading and Land Fortunes

Part Two: The Industrial Fortunes

Part Three: The Philanthropy Dynasties

Part Four: The Modern Fortunes

Part Five: The Great Houses

The record this section cannot complete is stated in its own note file: several of the city's industrial families left no published estate figures at all, and for the living, this section prints only what they and the public record have already printed. What Fort Wayne's money did is nonetheless legible — in Lindenwood's subscriptions and Swinney's acres, in an art museum that began in a hosiery maker's front rooms, in a theatre and a conservatory downtown, and in foundation filings, renewed every year, that turn the News-Sentinel's old profits and a Lincoln Life doctor's stock into grants. The fortunes were made here. A remarkable share of them is still here.