Fort Wayne
In 1843 the Fort Wayne Sentinel printed an old soldier's account of Harmar's defeat, copied from a journal he had kept for fifty-two years. One line of it puts Chief Richardville in the river that morning. Twenty-five years later the county's first history put the same man on the bank, a boy of ten or twelve, watching.
The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, 1917, printed page 99, scan leaf n106, via the Internet Archive.
How this county was settled, named and fought over, read out of the county histories from Brice in 1868 to Griswold in 1917, the garrison orderly books, and the Fort Wayne Sentinel.
Fort Wayne
In December 1760 the officer holding Detroit explained why a lieutenant had gone to keep the post at the head of the Maumee through the winter. He gave three reasons in one sentence. In 1917 a Fort Wayne historian quoted it and changed the only part about this ground.
Beyond Allen County
In August 1773 the Miami answered Sir William Johnson, and told his deputy that the mischief in the country came from the Six Nations, whom Johnson trusted most. Then they said what ten years of English possession had been worth to them.
Fort Wayne
A British force crossed the nine mile carrying place at the head of the Maumee in October 1778 and found the water beyond it too low to float the boats. What carried them down was a beaver dam, and the officer who cut it wrote down why nobody there touched the beaver.
The bridges, mills, towns and courthouses of Allen County, and the men who took the contracts.
Fort Wayne
In March 1844 Samuel Edsall asked Fort Wayne for a bridge over the St. Mary's and took the contract himself. He took the plank road to Bluffton partly in stock, and the second and third courthouses as contractor.
Fort Wayne
Marshall S. Wines built a sawmill on Cedar Creek in 1834 and the Woodlawn Mills on the Maumee in 1838. In 1841 he went bail for another man's debt. By July 1842 the mill was late Col. Wines', and in September he died at his canal contract.
Allen County
Henry Burgess laid out New Haven along the canal in 1839, kept its first store and ashery, and moved the post office there. In 1842 the Sentinel said he got that office by the removal of a neighbour. In 1866 he built the Methodists a brick church.
A rival canal line, the scrip a farmer was paid in, the ashes he sold by the ton, and the first likenesses taken in the town.
Fort Wayne
In April 1841 William D. Mahon headed his canal advertisement with one word, OPPOSITION, and promised to step between the public's purse and the old line's extortion. By January his horses and harness had been attached.
Fort Wayne
At the end of August 1843 two Fort Wayne merchants set out the paper a farmer might be handed across their counter. A dollar in old scrip bought 85 or 90 cents of goods that week. A dollar in Blue Dog bought 40. Nobody would put a number on the Blue Pup.
Fort Wayne
In the autumn of 1843 Charles E. Keith took rooms in a brick building in Fort Wayne and set out a camera. Four weeks later the town had a daguerreotypist of its own, and the editor of the Sentinel said the same thing about both men's likenesses: as true as a mirror.
A school tax the city voted down, a seminary meant to run on court fines, a college its sheriff put up for sale, and a schoolhouse nobody could reach.
Fort Wayne
In June 1853 Fort Wayne had 1,200 school children and no public schoolhouse. The editor of the Sentinel wrote that a school tax might be more than the city could bear, and the voters turned it down, 325 to 130. Five years later he was elected a school trustee.
Fort Wayne
The county's first school was meant to be paid for by the fines of its courts. In 1841 the clerk counted $3,392.70 in fines and forfeitures since 1824, and $238.31 collected. In 1860 one of the seminary's lots was forfeited back to the fund.
Fort Wayne
In June 1847 a procession laid the corner stone of the Fort Wayne Female College at the end of West Wayne Street. Eleven years later the sheriff offered the same ground for sale at the suit of David M. Dunbar, and the paper never said what happened next.
Fort Wayne, Gateway of the West, 1802-1813, edited by Bert J. Griswold, Indiana Historical Collections volume XV, 1927, the plate facing printed folio 132, scan leaf n154.. Internet Archive.
Ten plates out of four county books, each cropped to its own printed border and captioned exactly as the sheet prints it. Six of them were paid for by the person in them.
History of Allen County, Indiana, 1880, leaf n131. Public domain. Published before 1929, so out of copyright in the United States.
Twenty townships. The dashed line is Fort Wayne's city limits today, not the town at any earlier date. The count is where a piece is chiefly set.
Two organisations in this county keep the ground and the record that most of the history here is written from. Both are open to anybody who turns up.
Run by Historic Fort Wayne, Inc.
A full-size reconstruction of the post American troops built under Major John Whistler in 1815, standing less than a quarter of a mile from where the original stood. Whistler's own drawing of that fort is in this archive's Maps section, dated August 1816 by the 1917 history that printed it and 1815 by the library that holds the sheet.
The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana, by B. J. Griswold, 1917, printed page 157, scan leaf n164. Internet Archive. Public domain. Published before 1929, so out of copyright in the United States.
Fort Wayne, Indiana
A lineage society whose members are proven descendants of men who fought for American independence, working in Fort Wayne through education, patriotic service and historical preservation. It is named for a Hessian soldier captured at Trenton on the morning after Washington crossed the Delaware, who then joined the American side and served as a teamster for the rest of the war.
The mark of the Anthony Halberstadt Chapter, used by permission of the chapter.
Disclosure: the publisher of the Standard is this chapter's secretary and built its website. Listings are free and are never sold. How we handle this.
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