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1853 – 1887
The early written record is thin, and what survives is institutional: when Fort Wayne's first free public school opened in September 1853, its first teachers were Mr. Mahurin and Mrs. Hulburd — a woman in the classroom from the system's first day (the Schools chapter carries the opening in full). In 1861 the women of the city made and presented the silk colour the 30th Indiana carried to the Civil War, and the county's emblematic nurse of that war was one of its own: Eliza E. "Mother" George, who died of typhoid in a camp at Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1865, a month after Appomattox, and lies in Lindenwood under a soldier's monument (her record is in the Story and Wars chapters). The same year, 1861, Fort Wayne's Jewish women organized the Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Society, which aided Union soldiers of all faiths; its minutes for 1894–1916 survive, it marked its fiftieth anniversary with a jubilee luncheon at the Anthony Hotel in 1911, and it disbanded only in 1921, when its philanthropy passed to the new Fort Wayne Jewish Federation. Its full record is in the Charities and Communities chapters. In 1887 the Hamilton women — Emerine J. Hamilton and her daughters — opened a free reading room for women on West Wayne Street, the seed from which the public library's staff would come; it is told in full in the Libraries chapter.
Sources: the Schools chapter (the 1853 opening and first teachers); the Story and Wars chapters (the 30th's colour; Eliza E. George); the Charities chapter and the Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Society minutes, 1894–1916 (Internet Archive); the Communities chapter (the 1921 disbanding); the Libraries chapter (the Hamilton Reading Room, 1887–1895).