Forts of Fort Wayne

By John Beatty

Fort Wayne has an important military heritage, and it would be natural for a visitor to assume from its name that there must have once been a frontier fort located here. Actually, the city was the site of five different forts – French, British and American – between 1722 and 1819, and today Historic Fort Wayne, a reproduction of the last of these is the location of re-enactments and special events.

While in town for the Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference, genealogists or their travelling companions may want to visit Historic Fort Wayne to get a glimpse of what life was like in a French frontier outpost in the mid-1700s. Fort Miamies, 1754-1763, is a special event scheduled for the weekend of the conference. The fort will be open 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday, August 24, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, August 25. Guided tours will be offered on the hour from noon to 5 p.m. on Saturday and noon until 3 p.m. on Sunday. Admission is by donation. For more information, see the Events calendar at http://www.oldfortwayne.org, or call 260-437-2836.

In the late 17th century, French voyageurs were drawn to northeastern Indiana, attracted by the prospect of trading furs with the local Miami tribe. Fort Wayne rests on a Continental Divide at the confluence of three great waterways – the Maumee, St. Joseph and St. Mary’s rivers. To the east of the divide, water flows easterly and the Maumee River serves as a corridor to Lake Erie and the Great Lakes system. West of the divide, water flows west to the Wabash River just west of Fort Wayne, continues to the Ohio River, the Mississippi and on to the Gulf of Mexico. A strip of land about nine miles wide separates the Maumee from the Little Wabash River. Early travelers arriving by canoe and bateaux had to carry their boats from one water system to the other. Controlling that portage, therefore, meant controlling a great water highway that stretched from Quebec to New Orleans. Chief Little Turtle called it “that glorious gate … through which all the good words of our chiefs had to pass from south to north and from east to west.”

The French commissioned the construction of Fort St. Philippe in 1721 to protect their claim to the portage and to regularize their increasingly lucrative trade in beaver furs with the Miami. That site, located on what is now Van Buren Street along the St. Mary’s River, housed a small garrison of French soldiers at various times in the ensuing years, but the residents were often sick because of the fort’s swampy location. In 1747, after the fort was burned by a rival tribe of Indians, the site was deemed uninhabitable.

Construction of Fort St. Joseph, a second French fort, began in 1750 along the St. Joseph River where St. Joseph Avenue is now. This was near Kekionga, a great Miami village, and the French continued to trade with their Indian neighbors. Ten years later, near the close of the French and Indian War, the French abandoned Fort St. Joseph. It was occupied sporadically afterward by British soldiers, who used it for trading and as a storehouse of military supplies. During the Revolutionary War, Auguste Motin de la Balme, a French colonel allied with the Americans, invaded Kekionga and burned it and the fort to the ground. The victory was short-lived, however, when he and his men were annihilated the next day by a combined force of
Miami braves and traders. It is this second French fort that will be featured in Fort Miamies, 1754-1763 on FGS Conference weekend.

George Washington recognized the strategic importance of the area and during the 1790s sent several military expeditions in an attempt to secure American control of the portage. In 1794 General Anthony Wayne, fresh from his victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, constructed what became Fort Wayne. From that time, the region remained under American control. Two more forts were built later, a large hexagonal structure in 1798 under Colonel Thomas Hart and another, smaller fort in 1816 under Major John Whistler. Both of these were located in what is now the downtown area near the intersections of Main and Clay streets. During these years the fort served as a major trading post, where treaties with the Indians were negotiated and annuities distributed through an official Indian agency. While the fort was besieged briefly during the War of 1812, it saw little other military activity and was de-commissioned by the U.S. Army in 1819. Various local families moved into the vacated log structures, and for a time the blockhouse was an Indian school run by the Baptist missionary Isaac McCoy. By 1852, the last remaining blockhouse had fallen into ruin.

In 1976, a group of entrepreneurs inspired by the United States Bicentennial reconstructed a replica of the 1816 fort along the St. Joseph River at a different location from the original. For many years it served as a living history museum, complete with costumed re- enactors. Today, while it is no longer a museum, the fort still serves as a location for special events, like the one taking place August 24-25.