Allen Hamilton: Banking at the Head of the Maumee

The fortune: Hamilton, an Irish immigrant who rose from clerk to merchant to banker, became president of the Fort Wayne branch of the State Bank of Indiana in 1835, when the branch bank was the financial center of a town still living on the fur trade and the coming canal. In 1853 he formed the private banking house of Allen Hamilton & Co. with Hugh McCulloch and Jesse L. Williams, the canal's chief engineer (Paulison). His estate home was called Veraestau. His profile is in the People section; this is the fortune record.

Its scale: No published valuation of Hamilton's estate has been found, and none is stated here. The scale has to be read from what he could do: he was a $1,000 subscriber to Lindenwood Cemetery in 1859, when that was among the largest subscriptions taken, and in 1861 he donated the land at Lewis and Calhoun streets that became the city's ball grounds — the lot where, on May 4, 1871, Fort Wayne hosted the first game of the first professional baseball league.

What it left: Besides the ball grounds, his wife Emerine Hamilton started the city's first public reading room, the ancestor of its public library tradition. Hamilton's bank, through its partners, fed directly into the city's next two generations of finance — his partner McCulloch's fortune is the next entry, and the Hamilton name stayed on Fort Wayne banking into the twentieth century.

Sources:

1. Arthur M. Paulison, Pioneers Resting in Historic Lindenwood — the 1853 partnership, the Lindenwood subscription, the reading room.
2. Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society / Lindenwood records — the 1861 ball-grounds gift and the 1871 game.