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The fortune: Dr. Calvin English (1858–1948) was one of the thirty-one Fort Wayne businessmen who founded the Lincoln Life Insurance Company in 1905, and its first medical director. Fort Wayne historian Randy Harter's account explains the fortune's mechanism: English's work let Lincoln rate and write substandard policies profitably, the company grew into a national insurer, and English died in 1948 leaving a large amount of Lincoln National Life stock, which his wife Mary Tower English held.
The foundation: In the early 1970s — the foundation dates its establishment to 1972 — Mary Tower English, her sister-in-law Louise Bonter, and her daughter Elizabeth (Betty) Mitchell created the English-Bonter-Mitchell Foundation in Dr. English's honor, guided, Harter records, by Jack Lehman, then chief executive of the Fort Wayne National Bank. The trustee today is PNC Bank, successor to Fort Wayne National, and the foundation is administered from Pittsburgh — a Fort Wayne fortune managed, by its own structure, from out of state.
Its scale: Public filings again. The foundation's Form 990-PF reports assets at fair market value of $167,460,930 at the end of tax year 2024, and grants paid of $6,351,165 across 109 grants in 2024 — every itemized grant dollar to Indiana recipients, eighty-nine of the grants in Fort Wayne. Harter's published estimate of "somewhere in the area of $150M+" sits inside the range the filings establish.
Sources:
- Randy Harter, account preserved by the Allen County Genealogical Society — Dr. English, the Lincoln stock, the 1970s founding, the Lehman guidance, the asset estimate.
- English-Bonter-Mitchell Foundation, Form 990-PF, tax years 2022–2024 (public filings, via ProPublica-derived foundation profiles) — assets and grants.
- Plymouth Congregational Church newsletter history; Huntington University — the 1972 establishment by Mary Tower English, Louise Bonter, and Elizabeth Mitchell; more than $5 million granted in a single recent year (2015).