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  • A newspaper advertisement headed 1841 at both corners and OPPOSITION! in wide capitals. Beneath it, The Good Intent line of Packet and Freight Boats, with a small woodcut of a long cabin boat towed by a horse with a rider. Two paragraphs of small type follow, signed for the proprietors by Wm. D. Mahon, agent, and dated April 22, 1841.

    Fort Wayne

    Opposition on the canal

    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

    The value in this market

    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.

  • A small newspaper advertisement. The word Colored in small capitals sits over Daguerreotype Likenesses in heavy decorated type, then: Taken in a few minutes by the newly invented Daguerreotype Apparatus, signed J. L. Hubbell. A last line invites the public to examine specimens at his room in Hanna and Barnett's brick, in the rear of Wallace and Johnson's office.

    Fort Wayne

    As true to nature as the reflection in a mirror

    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 three line newspaper advertisement between two rules. The number 100 is set in very large black type at the left. Beside it, in italic: Tons Black Salts and 15,000 Bushels of Ashes wanted, for which the highest price will be paid by A. B. Miller. The first letter of Tons did not print.

    Fort Wayne

    Boiling down their ashes to black salts

    In November 1843 a man named Miller began building an ashery in Fort Wayne, and several farmers had bought kettles to boil their ashes down to black salts. In 1845 Miller wanted a hundred tons. In 1854 the last call for black salts ran three weeks.

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

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