Fort Wayne is a city in Allen County, Indiana, United States, and its county seat. Located in northeastern Indiana, the city is 18 miles (29 km) west of the Ohio border and 50 miles (80 km) south of the Michigan border. The city's population was 263,886 at the 2020 census, making it the 2nd-most populous city in Indiana after Indianapolis, and the 82nd-most populous city in the U.S. The Fort Wayne metropolitan area, consisting of Allen, Wells and Whitley counties, has an estimated population of 463,000. Fort Wayne is the cultural and economic center of northeastern Indiana.
Fort Wayne was built in 1794 by the United States Army under the direction of American Revolutionary War general Anthony Wayne, the last in a series of forts built near the Miami village of Kekionga. Named in Wayne's honor, the European-American settlement developed at the confluence of the St. Joseph, St. Marys, and Maumee rivers, known originally as Fort Miami, a trading post constructed by Jean Baptiste Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes around 1706. The modern city was platted in 1823 following its revitalization after the War of 1812 and its siege. It underwent tremendous growth after completion of the Wabash and Erie Canal and advent of the railroad.
Once a booming manufacturing town located in what became known as the Rust Belt, Fort Wayne's economy in the 21st century is based upon distribution, transportation and logistics; healthcare, professional and business services; leisure and hospitality, and financial services. Home to the Fort Wayne Air National Guard Base, the city is a center for the defense industry, which employs 1–2% of the population. Fort Wayne was an All-America City Award recipient in 1983, 1998, 2009, and 2021. The city also received an Outstanding Achievement City Livability Award by the U.S. Conference of Mayors in 1999.
The Native Americans and New France
Original settlement and French control (1706-1760)
This area here on the river confluence was occupied by successive cultures of indigenous peoples for as long as 10,000 years. The Miami tribe would eventually establish its settlement of Kekionga at this confluence of the Maumee, St. Joseph, and St. Marys rivers in the late stages of the Beaver Wars in the 1690s. It was the capital of the Miami nation and related Algonquian tribes.
In 1696, Comte de Frontenac appointed Jean Baptiste Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes, who began visiting Kekionga in 1702, and would later build the original Fort Miami here in the wilderness and pays d'en Haut of New France around 1706; Initially, a small trading outpost. It was part of a group of forts and trading posts built between Quebec and St. Louis. The first census in 1744 recorded a population of approximately 40 Frenchmen and 1,000 Miamians.
From the British back to the Miami (1760-1776)
Increasing tension between France and Great Britain developed over control of the territory. In 1760, France ceded the area to Britain after its forces in North America surrendered during the Seven Years' War, known on the North American front as the French and Indian War. Managing to hold down the fort for only a mere couple of years, the British lost control of it in 1763 when various Native American nations rebelled against British rule and retook the fort as part of Pontiac's Rebellion. From this point forward in 1763, no active fort existed at Kekionga for the next three decades until American General Anthony Wayne established Fort Wayne in 1794, following the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The fort throughout this period was described as a, "Defiant mixture of Indian warriors and lawless renegades of the frontier, such as the Girties. It was also the home of a heterogeneous population of English and French traders and their families, French 'engages", and Miami, Delaware and Shawnee tribes."
In 1772, the British regained influence over the village after Sir William Johnson suggested to the government that the fort be reoccupied. The mixed population of the Kekionga area had moved past antipathy with the British by this point, and accepted their friendship. In 1776, Officer Jacques LaSalle moved into the village to conduct strict supervision on behalf of the British government, ensuring that the natives remained loyal to the British, and to check passports with travelers coming down from Fort Detroit.
American Revolution to the Old Northwest
The British continued to monitor Kekionga and Fort Miami throughout the American Revolutionary War. In 1780, French Canadian soldiers coming to assist the U.S. with the revolution were slaughtered in several nearby locations in what is known as La Balme's Defeat. At the end of the Revolutionary War, in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Britain ceded this area to the new United States, though they continued to maintain an influence on trading activity and the forts of Miami, with the primary objective of slowing American expansion into the Great Lakes region. The young United States formally organized the region in the Land Ordinance of 1785 and negotiated treaties allowing settlement, but the Western Confederacy of Native American nations were not party to these treaties and did not cede their ownership of those lands.
American land speculators and pioneers began flooding down the Ohio River into the area, leading to conflict with an alliance of native tribes known as the Western Confederacy. It was headquartered at Kekionga, where the Miami had permitted two refugee tribes dislodged by white homesteaders, the Delaware and the Shawnee, to resettle. The confederacy—which included other Great Lakes and Algonquin tribes as well—began sending war parties to raid settlers, hoping to drive them back across the Appalachian Mountains, and refused to meet for negotiations over a possible treaty to instead cede land for white settlement. The growing violence led to the Northwest Indian War.
In 1790, President George Washington ordered the U.S. Army to subdue and pacify the tribes. The first expedition, led by General Josiah Harmar reached Kekionga and exercised scorched earth tactics on the village and crops. Miami war chief Little Turtle, who had been long tracking the whereabouts of Harmar though the aid of various agents such as Simon Girty, would quickly drive Harmar and the US troops away. The confederacy warriors attacked the second invading force, led in 1791 by General Arthur St. Clair, before it could get that far and wiped it out, in a massacre known as St. Clair's Defeat at modern-day Fort Recovery, Ohio. It's known as the greatest defeat of the U.S. Army by Native Americans in history. This defeat left the US army crippled and borders open to attacks from the British and allied native tribes. General Anthony Wayne was recalled from civilian life to lead a third expedition, defeating the confederacy's warriors at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, near modern-day Toledo, Ohio on August 20, 1794. Wayne's men then marched up the Maumee River, systematically burning evacuated native towns, crops, and winter food stores, until they reached its headwaters, where Kekionga remained in ruins. Wayne then confronted the British at Fort Miami, where the British debated an attack. Later, Wayne selected the site for construction of Fort Wayne. He ordered a fort that could withstand heavy British artillery, especially a 24-pound cannon, along with attacks from their army or native allies.
The following year, Wayne negotiated a peace accord, the Treaty of Greenville with tribal leaders, in which they agreed to stop fighting, end support of the British, and ceded most of what is now Ohio along with certain tracts further west, including the area around Fort Wayne encompassing Kekionga and the land portage. Wayne promised the remainder would remain Indian lands, which is why the territory west of Ohio was named Indiana. Wayne would die one year later and a Spanish spy James Wilkinson would assume his role as General. In subsequent years, the government used Fort Wayne to hand out annual payments under the treaty. But in a recurring cycle, the tribes ran up debts to white traders who came there to sell them alcohol and manufactured goods, and the government pushed tribal leaders—including through bribes—to sell more reservation land to pay off those debts and, when the land was gone, then to agree to have the tribe removed to the Far West.