Ten things worth knowing about Fort Wayne

Fort Wayne is growing again, adding about 11,000 residents since 2020 by the Census Bureau's latest count, which means plenty of new neighbors who have not yet heard the city's stories. Here are ten worth passing along, each checked against the people who keep the record.

A name and a gathering place

One: the city is named for a general. General Anthony Wayne, known as Mad Anthony, built the first American fort where the St. Marys, St. Joseph and Maumee rivers meet, and the settlement that grew around it kept his name. His fort went up in 1794.

Two: long before the fort, this was already a crossroads. For as long as 10,000 years people lived around the three rivers. In the 1790s the Miami settlement here was called Kekionga, a gathering place where Huron, Ottawa and Shawnee people met too, and early settlers called it Miami Town. The Miami were forcibly removed from Indiana in 1846. Their story is still told at the History Center and at its related site, the Chief Richardville House, a brick home built in 1827 on the banks of the St. Marys for Jean Baptiste de Richardville, a Miami leader whose trading made him the wealthiest Native American in Indiana in his day.

Water, height and weather

Three: Summit City is about a canal, not a mountain. When the Wabash and Erie Canal was dug through Fort Wayne in the 1830s, the city stood at the highest point along its route. The nickname stuck long after the canal boats were gone, and it still turns up on businesses, teams and the farmers market at Electric Works.

Four: winter here is the real thing, and it can arrive early or linger late. The National Weather Service puts Fort Wayne's average snowfall at about 33.6 inches a year. Its records show snow as early as September 25, in 1942, and as late as May 10, in both 1945 and 1960. Locals keep a scraper in the car well into spring for a reason, and nobody puts the snow shovel away in April.

An apple planter and a library

Five: Johnny Appleseed is buried here, on the highest hill of the park named for him near the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum, where a pioneer-style festival marks his memory each September.

Six: genealogists travel here from around the world. The Allen County Public Library's Genealogy Center, inside the Main Library downtown, describes itself as the largest public library family research center in the United States. Visit Fort Wayne counts more than 960,000 items in its collection, and visitors use it for free, along with databases that usually cost a subscription.

Lights on

Seven: Fort Wayne played baseball under electric lights in 1883. In June of that year, a local college team took on a professional club from Quincy, Illinois, under seventeen lights installed by the Jenney Electric company, with about 2,000 people watching. The players struggled with shadows, and Visit Fort Wayne notes that professional night baseball did not truly arrive until 1930. James Jenney's lighting company went on to build the factory that General Electric bought in 1899, the campus that is now Electric Works.

Eight: Santa has been lighting up downtown since 1937. That year the Wolf and Dessauer department store unveiled a plywood Santa and his reindeer, glowing with more than 40,000 lights, along with a Merry Christmas wreath. The store's animated holiday windows had started in 1928. Today Santa hangs on the PNC building and the wreath on the Indiana Michigan Power building, and both switch on during Night of Lights, the evening before Thanksgiving.

Saved, and still serving

Nine: the Embassy Theatre on West Jefferson Boulevard, a 1928 movie palace that took the Embassy name in 1952, came within two days of demolition in 1972 before volunteers raised the money to save it.

Ten: the coney dog has been a downtown habit since 1914, when Fort Wayne's Famous Coney Island opened on West Main Street, and the stand says it still chops more than 70 pounds of onions by hand every day.

That is ten. Ask anyone who grew up here and you will likely hear an eleventh, which is half the fun of living in the Summit City.