About The Standard

The Fort Wayne Standard is a record of Fort Wayne and Allen County. County and town history, the people who built the places, the businesses that have been here a long time and the ones that opened last spring, and a directory of local help that is accurate and free.

It is not a newspaper. It does not cover breaking news and it does not work the courthouse. What it does is slower. Every piece here is meant to be worth reading in five years.

On 1 June 1854 a paper called the Fort Wayne Standard published its first issue. Daniel W. Burroughs had bought out Thomas Cook's literary weekly, the Laurel Wreath, and started something else in its place. His fellow editors were two attorneys, Charles Case and John Hough, Jr.

It was an abolition paper. The county history records it as carrying the advocacy of abolition, free school and prohibition doctrines. In its first issue the three men promised to argue not only for the repeal of the Kansas and Nebraska Act but for the constitutional right of all people to equality. Allen County was one of the few counties in Indiana that had voted against Article XIII of the 1851 state constitution, the article that barred black people from settling in the state.

It cost him. Bert Griswold wrote later that Burroughs brought upon himself many threats of personal injury and the egging of his newspaper office. In December 1855 he severely injured his hand in his steam printing press. The Sentinel, which disagreed with him about nearly everything, reported that week that it was truly sorry to learn of it.

The paper did not last. This one takes the name because of what that one was for, and for no other reason.

This publication is not affiliated with, continued from, or connected to any other newspaper named the Standard, past or present, in this county or any other. The name is not a claim on anyone else's masthead.

The account of the 1854 paper above rests on Peggy Seigel, "The Fort Wayne Standard: A Reform Newspaper in the 1850s Storm", Indiana Magazine of History, volume 97, number 3, 2001, pages 169 to 189, which is the authority on it, together with the History of Allen County and the Fort Wayne Sentinel of 22 December 1855.

The Fort Wayne Standard is published by Indian Lakes Marketing LLC, which is also a marketing company with clients. It is the same business, not a separate one, and some of the businesses written about here are or have been its clients.

Where that is true, the piece says so in a line under the headline, above the fold, before you read anything else. It names the business, says whether it is a current or a former client, and says that profiles are free and are never sold. The same applies to any organisation, town site or resource listing this company built: it carries the disclosure or it is not linked.

Money does not change what a piece says or whether it runs. Listings and profiles are free. Nothing on this site is for sale and there is no sponsored content. If any of that ever stops being true, this page will say so.

Every date, name and claim about a particular family or business gets two independent sources before it is stated flat. Where only one source exists, the piece says so.

A later book repeating an earlier one is not a second source. Where two accounts disagree, the disagreement is the finding, and it goes in the piece rather than being quietly resolved.

Dates, names and figures are read off the page image, not off a search result and not off a transcription. Scanned text turns plausible words into other plausible words, and the error is invisible until somebody opens the page.

Where something comes from a person's memory rather than a written record, the piece says that, and publishes it anyway. Family memory is real history. It is a different kind of evidence and it deserves to be labelled honestly rather than dressed up as a document.

Sources are listed at the foot of every piece, with the page and the scan leaf, so a reader can go and check.

We will get things wrong. Allen County has been here since 1824 and this publication has been here five minutes.

A correction goes on the piece itself, dated, saying what it said before and what changed it. Pieces are not quietly edited and corrections are not moved to a page nobody reads. If a piece is wrong enough that the correction changes its argument, the correction says that too.