In the era of
gas lighting, Fort Wayne Gas Works, located on the site of today’s Hall’s Gas
House restaurant on Superior
Street between Barr and Lafayette streets, was the
central public utilities operation in Fort
Wayne.
Fort Wayne had
turned to the production of artificial gas as early as 1853 when the Fort Wayne
Gas Light Company was franchised by the city to operate a plant at the corner
of Barr Street and the Canal (in a block that extended south of the present
restaurant to the railroad tracks). The
company was incorporated in 1855 for private residence lighting only.
By 1857 a
contract with the company provided for gas lighting several street
intersections (property owners on the intersections were assessed their share
of the cost in proportion to the amount of their property illuminated), but the
company was dissolved in 1886 with the coming of natural gas.
In the last
two decades of the nineteenth century, Fort
Wayne was known as “a natural gas town” because of the
great gas boom, and “nearly every home in the city was lighted and heated with
gas for a time.” Fort Wayne was supplied by the Salamonie
Mining and Gas Company under the presidency of Fort Wayne attorney Robert Bell in the
1880s. During Indiana’s natural gas boom of the 1880s and
1890s, gas seemed to be an endless resource for industry and city lighting.
By 1905, a new
enterprise named the Fort Wayne Gas Company had been formed to import natural
gas from elsewhere; this company was the predecessor to Northern Indiana Public
Service Company (NIPSCO), which provides Fort
Wayne’s present-day gas needs.
Since 1955,
the site of the old gas works has been occupied by the restaurant started in
1955 by Don Hall. The statue on the roof
of Hall’s Gas House depicting a man proudly standing with one foot on a beer
keg is that of Charles Louis Centlivre, one of Fort Wayne’s original brewers. His brewery stood for many years north of
this spot, at the intersection of Spy
Run Avenue and Spy Run Extended, just beyond Sate Boulevard. It is interesting to note that this statue
located on the site of the old gas works was also where the first brewer in Fort Wayne, George Fallo
(also, like Centlivre, of the German-French borderlands), maintained his
brewery, though according to a local way, “the manner of his fermenting his
beer was questionable.”
For a view of the Centlivre statue, go to:
Originally published in Fort Wayne Magazine, “Along the Heritage Trail with Tom Castaldi” – April
2005, No. 11, p. 31
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