Fort Wayne

On the morning of 22 October 1794 six companies marched into a new fort at the head of the Maumee, fired fifteen rounds, and gave it the name of the general who had sent them. Two officers who were there wrote it down that day. What they wrote, and what a county history did with it eighty-six years later, is where this archive begins.

Five years before that there was a town here already. A young trader named Henry Hay spent the winter of 1789 in it, played his flute at Christmas mass, and wrote down the captives brought in across the river. And in October 1790 a detachment crossed the river at a ford below the town and was cut to pieces there. An old soldier who marched with Harmar said a Miami chief was in the water that morning; the county's first historian, twenty-five years later, put the same man on the bank as a boy of ten or twelve.

The garrison years leave their own record. In 1811 a private pleaded guilty to rioting in the public cornfield, three men were sworn, and what they said was not about the riot. At the government factory the agent listed every man who owed it, down to a labourer owing two dollars and seventy and a half cents, and gave the Indian debtors one line with no name on it.

What the town did for money is the next thing the record holds. In April 1841 a canal man headed his advertisement with one word, OPPOSITION, and promised to step between the public's purse and the old line's extortion. Two years later two merchants set out the paper a farmer might be handed across their counter: a dollar in old scrip bought eighty-five or ninety cents of goods, a dollar in Blue Dog bought forty. That same autumn a man began building an ashery and farmers bought kettles to boil their ashes down to black salts, and a stranger took rooms in a brick building, set out a camera, and within four weeks the town had a daguerreotypist of its own.

Men built things here and lost them. Marshall S. Wines put up a sawmill on Cedar Creek and mills on the Maumee, went bail for another man's debt, and by July 1842 the mill was late Col. Wines'. Samuel Edsall asked the town for a bridge over the St. Mary's in March 1844 and took the contract himself.

The schools were argued over for twenty years. The county's first school was to be paid for out of court fines, and in 1841 the clerk counted what had been collected against what was owed: a total loss to the Seminary Fund. In June 1847 a procession laid the corner stone of a college at the end of West Wayne Street, and eleven years later the sheriff offered the same ground for sale. In June 1853 the town had twelve hundred school children and no public schoolhouse, and the voters turned down the tax that would have built one, more than they were either able or willing to bear.

Two endings, both in print here. In December 1855 a printer caught his hand in his own steam press, and six weeks later the paper across town reported that his Standard had stopped because of it. Ten years earlier word had come to a nurseryman that cattle were in one of his plantings on the St. Joseph; he went at once, lay down that night and did not get up again, and by 5 April 1845 a notice in this town called him late of Allen county, deceased.