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Founded 1894 — YWCA Northeast Indiana today
The workhorse institution of women's Fort Wayne: the YWCA was founded in Fort Wayne in 1894 as a safe place for employed women to meet — the earliest urban YWCA in Indiana, ahead of Indianapolis (1895) in the Discover Indiana account; a federal registration record gives the corporation's founding as March 1897, and the two dates stand in this record unreconciled, 1894 being the organization's own. Its founding constituency was the industrial workforce of the entry below: thousands of young women drawn to the knitting mills and electrical works, many from outlying towns, living in boardinghouses. From its founding the Y provided working girls "the privilege of a home and protection." Its dining rooms, the "Noon Rest," furnished low-cost meals — by 1910 an average of two hundred a day — but its sleeping rooms held only eleven temporary lodgers, and staff spent their days hunting decent boardinghouses for girls the Y could not house. In 1911 the Y launched a fund drive, led by committees of women with an advisory committee of business leaders, for a $100,000 home. The three-story building that opened in 1913 answered with scale: dormitory rooms for forty young women, a cafeteria whose oven could bake a hundred pies at a time, an oak-paneled lounge, a gymnasium and showers in the basement, a roof garden above. It was still not enough: in the fall of 1919 the Y opened an annex at 207 West Wayne Street for forty more. The Y's industrial department organized clubs inside the factories — at Wayne Knitting, GE, the Edison Lamp Works, Dudlo, the Wayne Box Company and the Home Telephone and Telegraph Company — running classes in basketry, sewing, gymnastics and cooking and Sunday teas; by 1920 the industrial clubs enrolled more than 1,200 young women. Seigel's study is plain about the Y's philosophy: it taught respectability, not workplace reform, and took no part in the union organizing of 1917–18 — a limit stated there and carried here. The later century changed the mission's center: the Charities chapter records the community pool and health center, the liaison work for servicemen's wives in the Second World War, and the first Black history class in the area. In 1978 the YWCA bought the former St. Vincent Villa orphanage property on North Wells Street. In 2009 it became YWCA Northeast Indiana, serving Allen, DeKalb, Huntington, Noble, Wells and Whitley counties; in March 2016 it broke ground, under its Campaign for Dignity, on a southeast-side facility to house its domestic-violence crisis shelter — the shelter it operates as Indiana's longest-serving — and in 2018 it absorbed the programs of the Women's Bureau (next entry but one). It has since acquired the former Hall's Guesthouse at 1313 West Washington Center Road as the Hefner Center. The Charities chapter carries the Y's charitable record in parallel; the building-by-building housing campaign of 1911–1919 is this branch's.
Sources: Seigel, "Industrial 'Girls'" (2003) — the Noon Rest, the eleven lodgers, the 1911 drive and $100,000, the 1913 building and its rooms, the 1919 annex at 207 West Wayne Street, the industrial clubs and the 1,200 enrolled; the Charities chapter of this record (the 1894 founding and March 1897 registration record, the pool, the servicemen's wives, the Black history class, the 1978 purchase, the 2018 absorption, citing YWCA Northeast Indiana's 2019 Annual Report and Discover Indiana); United Way of Allen County and YWCA Northeast Indiana (the 2009 name and service area, the Hefner Center); Around Fort Wayne, 28 March 2016 (the Campaign for Dignity groundbreaking).