The gallery

Ten plates out of four county books: a jail, a poorhouse, a newspaper office with its own prices painted on the gable, four farms and houses, five faces on one sheet, two more engraved with nothing under them but the sitter's signature, and the last blockhouse of the old fort standing in ruins in 1852.

Six of the ten are subscription plates, which means the person in them paid to be there. That is how the county's picture record was made, and it decides who is in it: a man with a good year could buy his farm a page, and the jail got one because it belonged to everybody.

Each plate is cropped to its own printed border and served at the size it was scanned, with its caption set here exactly as the sheet prints it, errors and all. Two of the ten are pen drawings rather than pictures taken from life, and say so.

• The Sentinel building on Calhoun Street

  1880. Leaf n131. Lithograph. The subject paid to appear.

• The last blockhouse in ruins

  1917. Leaf n150, printed page 143. Pen drawing, after a daguerreotype.

• Harmar’s ford as it was in 1917

  1917. Leaf n106, printed page 99. Pen drawing.

• The county jail

  1880. Leaf n95. Lithograph.

• The county asylum

  1880. Leaf n59. Lithograph.

• Five men of the county

  1880. Leaf n99. Lithograph. The subject paid to appear.

• F. P. Randall’s house

  1880. Leaf n141. Lithograph. The subject paid to appear.

• F. P. Randall

  1889. Leaf n82. Steel engraving. The subject paid to appear.

• Samuel Hanna

  1905. Leaf n80. Steel engraving. The subject paid to appear.

• The Geeseking farm in Washington Township

  1880. Leaf n308. Lithograph. The subject paid to appear.

The books

• 1880. History of Allen County, Indiana, Kingman Brothers, Chicago. 6 plates here. Scanned by the Internet Archive from the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center copy.
• 1889. Valley of the Upper Maumee River, volume 1. 1 plates here. The imprint was not read off the title page, so the publisher is left blank rather than guessed.
• 1905. History of the Maumee River Basin, volume 3, Allen County. 1 plates here. Volume 3 is the Allen County volume, by Col. Robert S. Robertson. The imprint was not read off the title page.
• 1917. The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana, volume 1. 2 plates here. By B. J. Griswold. The imprint was not read off the title page.

The maps are elsewhere

The county's plat sheets and the plans of the fort are in the maps section.