Allen County in order
In the autumn of 1780 a French colonel rode out for one storehouse and did not come back. Seventy-eight years later a sheriff stood at the courthouse door and offered a college's ground for sale. Between them sit 42 dated events, in the order they happened.
Every one of them comes out of a piece published here, and links back to it. That is the whole rule: no event this archive has not written about, and no date its sources do not carry. The line under each year is built from that piece's own sentences, so a reader who doubts one can open it and check.
It follows that this page is a record of what has been written rather than of what happened. It begins in 1780 and ends in 1858 because those are the ends of the archive, not the ends of the county, and it grows when a piece does.
1760
On 11 December Captain Donald Campbell wrote from Detroit that a lieutenant of the Rangers had gone to hold the post at the head of the Maumee through the winter, because it is the other head of the river and from it there is a carrying place of nine miles into the waters of the Ouabache.
Michigan Historical Collections volume 19, The Bouquet Papers
1773
On 18 August the Miami answered Sir William Johnson, and told him the talks stirring up mischief came from the Six Nations, whom he esteemed so much. They had been looked upon as Bastards, they said, ever since the English came into possession of the country.
Michigan Historical Collections, volume 19
1778
Henry Hamilton's force reached the Miamis Town on 24 October and crossed the portage of nine miles. On the other side the water was too low to float the boats, and a beaver dam four miles from the landing place carried them down.
Michigan Historical Collections volume 9, The Haldimand Papers
1780
A French colonel rode out of Ouiatanon for one storehouse at the Miami town. Two men wrote down what happened to him within a month, one at Vincennes and one at Detroit, and the county's four histories used neither.
Illinois Historical Collections volume 8; Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society, 1909
1781
In February a Miami chief answered a speech from the French at Post Vincennes with four presentations, every one of them red, and then rose and sang the war song; the clerk who wrote it down opened a bracket and never closed it.
Michigan Historical Collections volume 19, The Haldimand Papers
1781
In March an English captain at the Miami town signed a trader's accounts he could not read, and asked Charles Beaubien to write the Indian speeches in French, because he understood only a third of what was said.
Michigan Historical Collections volume 19, The Haldimand Papers
1789
On Christmas morning Henry Hay took his flute to mass at the Miami town, and through that winter wrote down the captives brought in across the river.
Fort Wayne in 1790: the journal of Henry Hay
1790
Josiah Harmar marched an army north to the Miami towns. A first sergeant who was there said a Miami chief was in the water at the ford; the county's first historian later put him on the bank, a boy of ten or twelve.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 4 March 1843
1791
On 1 July, at the foot of the Miamis Rapids, a Detroit trader's bill for two cows, ten bushels of corn and a hundred pounds of tobacco was settled by Little Turtle and Blue Jacket out of the annual presents the King had sent, and not by the Crown.
Michigan Historical Collections volume 20
1794
On the morning of 22 October, after a night cold enough to freeze the ground hard, Hamtramck marched six companies into a new log fort, fired fifteen rounds and gave it the name.
Journal of Wayne's Campaign; The American Pioneer
1794
On 25 October an order at head quarters among the Miami villages appointed Lieutenant John Wade Fort Major of Fort Wayne, and offered twenty five dollars for information on the soldiers robbing the country around it.
Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections, volume 34
1795
At the Greenville council on 30 July, Anthony Wayne said the six miles square where the St. Joseph meets the St. Mary's had been ceded to the French long ago. Little Turtle answered that one of the forts Wayne had traced was built by him, and that nobody had ever sold the Miami villages.
American State Papers, Class II, Indian Affairs, volume 1
1805
On 10 September John Johnston made a fair copy of what the United States factory was owed, down to a labourer owing two dollars and seventy and a half cents. The Indian debtors are one line with no name on it.
Fort Wayne, Gateway of the West, 1802-1813
1807
On 6 January the officer commanding at Chicago reported that he had routed himself through Fort Wayne twice for meat, and that the contractor's agent there could furnish neither post, his bills having been protested.
Michigan Historical Collections, volume 40
1811
On 26 March a fatigue party from the garrison was at work in the public cornfield. A private pleaded guilty to rioting, and what the witnesses said was not about the riot.
Fort Wayne, Gateway of the West, 1802-1813
1812
In October General Winchester ordered the goods brought from Fort Wayne priced against what similar articles fetched in Lexington, divided between the regiments by their strength, and issued to the men against their pay.
Michigan Historical Collections, volume 31
1837
In September the commissioners organised Cedar Creek Township. Somebody built its first schoolhouse near the centre of it, by a swamp, with no roads leading to it, and it was never used as a school.
History of Allen County, Indiana, 1880
1838
Marshall S. Wines bought a sawmill on the south bank of the Maumee, about ten rods east of where the Hanover Street bridge would later cross the canal.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 30 July 1842
1839
Land Samuel Hanna had sold to Eben Burgess was cut into town lots and named New Haven.
History of Allen County, Indiana, 1880
1841
In April the clerk counted the fines and forfeitures the courts had owed the Seminary Fund since 1824 against what had actually been collected.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 8 May 1841
1841
On 22 April 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.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 22 May 1841
1842
On 4 January a justice of the peace issued a writ of domestic attachment against Mahon's goods, chattels, credits and effects.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 8 January 1842
1842
On 24 September the Sentinel announced the death of Col. Wines, who had gone bail for another man's debt and lost the mills for it.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 24 September 1842
1843
On 17 June Hamilton & Williams offered the highest price for any quantity of black salts, and farmers bought kettles to boil their ashes down.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 26 August 1843
1843
At the end of August 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.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 2 September 1843
1843
On 4 November a stranger advertised a camera in a brick building in town. Four weeks later the editor said the town had a daguerreotypist of its own.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 4 November 1843
1844
In March Samuel Edsall asked the town for a bridge over the St. Mary's and took the contract himself.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 23 March 1844
1845
Word came to John Chapman that cattle had broken into one of his nurseries. He went at once, lay down that night and did not get up again, and by 5 April a notice called him late of Allen county, deceased.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 19 April 1845
1847
On a Wednesday in June a procession formed at the Methodist church and walked to the ground at the end of West Wayne Street to lay the corner stone of the Fort Wayne Female College.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 26 June 1847
1851
In April Louis Lopshire platted Middletown beside the new plank road and placed it on the county records.
History of Allen County, Indiana, 1880
1853
On 11 June the editor of the Sentinel gave a paragraph to the school meeting at the courthouse. The city had twelve hundred school children and no public schoolhouse, and the voters turned the tax down.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 11 June 1853
1855
On a Wednesday in December Daniel W. Burroughs caught his hand in his own steam press.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 22 December 1855
1856
On 2 February the Sentinel printed a second notice: the Standard had stopped, its editor being incapacitated by the injury.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 2 February 1856
1857
The first public school opened on Monday 9 February, four years after the town voted against paying for one.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 9 February 1857
1858
On 29 May the sheriff offered the college ground for sale, taken as the property of the trustees.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 29 May 1858
1879
In October a woman killed by her husband in Perry township was buried outside consecrated ground with no priest, and an old lady recited the prayer for the dead in Latin at the graveside. Within the week two medical colleges had acquired three bodies, one of them dug out of Lindenwood's potter's field.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 9, 10 and 14 October 1879
1880
On 16 October the police court taxed Julia Miller ten dollars in one sentence for wandering around the streets. The man charged with associating with her was tried for four days and acquitted.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 16 and 19 October 1880
1894
On 31 March the Sentinel printed five deaths under a standing heading, with funeral notices and the city undertakers' list of the week's dead. Three of the names appear twice in the column, with different ages and different causes.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 31 March 1894
1896
On 4 January the stockholders of the new Home Telephone company met to elect officers, with over six hundred subscribers signed and a franchise still to be applied for. For twenty years afterwards a business that wanted to be reachable printed two numbers.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 4 January 1896
1901
On 2 April the Sentinel reported that the old canal towpath between Roanoke and Fort Wayne had been sold as an electric railway right of way, and that the man who had held an option on it was appealing to the supreme court.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 2 April 1901
1912
On a Friday night in November fifteen men who had grown up west of Calhoun street formed the Old Aqueduct club, named for a structure that was already gone. In 1916 a contractor trenching the old canal bed handed members fragments of its abutments.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 23 November 1912 and 23 February 1916
1913
On 1 October the Sentinel printed William McMullen's account of two days spent looking for the canal basin and the aqueduct with two boyhood friends, and finding nothing familiar.
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 1 October 1913