Barr Street Market: Trading Under the Trees

by Tom Castaldi

 

The Barr Street Market is open on Saturday mornings during the summer.

The Barr Street Market is the oldest market in Fort Wayne. The land was donated to the city by Samuel Hanna in 1837, and within six months a small frame market house was built.  Patterned after the design of the Philadelphia Market, the Barr Street Market rented stalls for five dollars a year.

          

A need for a specified central market area was evidence that Fort Wayne was rapidly growing in population and that surpluses were being produced by the pioneer farmers of the region.  The street and the market were named for John T. Barr who, with John McCorkle, came to the land sale together in a large boat called a bateau, which they propelled down the Saint Mary’s river.  They were assisted by Benjamin F. Blosser, a postmaster of Decatur, Indiana, who helped the two speculators move the boat and transport their luggage.  Once they landed, Blosser also assisted the partners by transferring their money to purchase the original 118 lots of the town of Fort Wayne from the U.S. Land Office in 1823 for $26 dollars an acre.

 
Bearing the signature of President James Monroe, the land grant for the ground became the heart of the city.  When the boundaries of Fort Wayne were first drawn, the eastern boarder was dubbed “Barr Street.” Although Barr and McCorkle turned out to be good partners, neither of these original proprietors chose to make his home here.  John Barr was a land speculator from Baltimore, Maryland, and not much is known about his time in Baltimore other than Barr was heavily involved in supplying trade goods to the Ohio and Pennsylvania frontier. 

           

John McCorkle was a born at Piqua, Ohio.  By 1791, he was an owner of a carding mill, gristmill and oil mill, and had laid the foundation for a very prosperous future.  He became Piqua’s leading merchant and, in 1821, along with a couple of other enterprising citizens, McCorkle founded Saint Marys, Ohio.  A powerful speaker, a state representative and a leader in many enterprises in Piqua, John McCorkle died in 1829 at the age of thirty-eight years.

 
As for his Fort Wayne connection, McCorkle speculated in western land purchases, but was interested primarily in profit from the Indian trade.  His first connection with northeastern Indiana came through his association with John P. Hedges when, previously in 1819, the two were engaged in furnishing beef and bread to the Indians while waiting for their annuities. 

Immediately after buying the land that became the heart of downtown Fort Wayne today, Barr and McCorkle had their new property surveyed and platted, so that they could begin selling the 118 lots.  This area was bordered on the north by Superior Street, on the east by Barr Street, on the south by Washington Boulevard, and on the west by the alley between Harrison and Calhoun streets.  Creeks ran from the high ground on the south side to empty into the Saint Mary’s River to the north, and there were thick swampy areas where early settlers hunted, such as the one where today the Elektron Building stands.

          

The $26 an acre Barr and McCorkle paid for the lands of the original plat was a very high amount for that time.  Most frontier lands were sold for the minimum $1.25 an acre.  Their heavy investment, however, was believed to be well worth the price in view of the continued presence of many Indians, the Indian Agency, and the very lucrative fur trade.  During these years the Fort Wayne fur trade was far greater than the combined trade of Detroit and Chicago, and the Indian Agency made annual payments of tens of thousands of dollars to the more than three thousand Indians who held the lands of northern Indiana.

           

Another attraction to Barr and McCorkle, as well as other speculators, was the exciting prospect of a grand canal through Indiana linking Lake Erie to the Ohio River with Fort Wayne as the hub.  By the 1850s this dream had been realized.  The original plat of Fort Wayne was at the center of the great Wabash & Erie Canal project with dozens of warehouse, boat docks, turnaround basins, custom houses, inns and taverns crammed into the heart of the young town.  Prosperity and hoards of new people followed.  For decades the canal running between Superior Street and Columbia Street (and today the railroad right-of-way) changed the community’s character from fur-trading outpost to mid-western transportation hub and production center.

          

Operated by the City of Fort Wayne, the Barr Street Market employed a “Market Master” to control vendor activities, including overseeing weights and measures.  The market flourished and in 1855 a new market building was erected.  Outdoor stalls were placed randomly between the many trees along Barr Street between Berry Street and Washington Boulevard, and the market house was used for various city governmental activities.

One of the more notable Market Masters was Peter Kiser (sometimes spelled Kaiser), who, tradition holds, was one of the first Germans to settle in Fort Wayne.  He made his first visit to town in 1822, when at age twelve brought in a drove of hogs from Ohio.

 
As a youngster he was a muscular lad and accustomed to hard work.  As an adult, he was a huge man, standing over six-feet tall and weighing more than three hundred pounds.  Although Kiser came to Fort Wayne in 1822 as a trader, he finally settled here in 1832 when he established the town’s first butcher shop.  He came to hold considerable political power, despite the fact that he could neither read nor write. 

For example, in 1847, Kiser was elected to the Indiana State legislature and during this term, and again in 1867, was an aggressive advocate for the development of public schools in the state.  Toasted as a local dignitary who was always accorded a place in every town parade, Kiser also served in one of the city’s volunteer fire departments, was a member of the local militia known as the “Wayne Guards” and was a fierce opponent of the temperance movement.

           

When a new city hall was built in 1893, the old market building was removed.  A grand covered concrete market complex was built in 1910 with pavilions joining great double iron arches over Wayne Street where elaborate water troughs were provided for the horses.  The lion-head water spigots on the troughs were made by the Borkenstein brothers who were German immigrants that had the contract for the construction of the arches. They could not abide the notion of mere unadorned water pipes for such a noble structure, and so they made their own spigots.

          

During its heyday, the Market operated six days a week both day and night.  There were 120 stalls that at times drew thousands of shoppers daily.  Located next to the police station in the Old City Hall, market-goers were occasionally treated to the sight of a fully loaded paddy wagon’s arrival for the detention of some rowdies.

           

The appearance of shopping centers and supermarkets led to the decline of the Barr Street Market and by 1958 the pavilions were removed.  By 1966, the city ended its market operation, but the Barr Street Market Association continued to rent stalls.  In 1988, the Allen County-Fort Wayne Historical Society assumed ownership of the market.  Conveniently located south of the History Center, the Market space continues to offer expanding possibilities with its potential for downtown pedestrian friendly connections to increased quality of life activities.

This article first appeared in:

Along the Heritage Trail with Tom Castaldi - May 2006 No 22

Allen County Historian Tom Castaldi is author of the Wabash & Erie Canal Notebook series; hosts “On the Heritage Trail,” which is broadcast at 6:35 a.m., 8:35 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. Mondays on WBOI, 89.1 FM; and “Historia Nostra” heard on WLYV-1450 AM and WRRO 89.9 FM. Enjoy his previously published columns on the History Center’s blog, “Our Stories,” at history centerfw.blogspot.com.

The Fort Wayne Methodist College

by Tom Castaldi

After several citizens of Fort Wayne raised $13,000 and William Rockhill donated three acres of land for the college, a board of fifteen trustees was appointed in 1847, advertisements for students were printed, and one of the largest buildings then in Fort Wayne was erected.  This four-story building in the center of a campus at the end of Wayne Street held as many as one hundred students.

The curriculum was traditional, with required studies in Latin, Greek and mathematics, as well as moral philosophy, music and penmanship.  In September 1850, the fist male students were enrolled as a separate division, and the entire student body was united as the Fort Wayne Methodist College in 1853.  College life was strictly regulated.  Daily attendance was required at chapel, Sunday worship and a weekly “Singspriation.”  Smoking, chewing, drinking, dancing, card playing, visiting downtown Fort Wayne and “roaming the fields” were all forbidden.

One of the most notable students in these early years was Henry Lawton, who became a career soldier and a model hero of the later nineteenth century.  Another student, Samuel Morris, also gained considerable local notoriety.  The product of Methodist missionary work, Morris had been known in his West African tribe of Kru as Prince Kaboo.  He was converted and came to the United States and entered the Fort Wayne Methodist College in 1892.  He had a charming personality and a zealous religious vocation, which quickly made him one of the best-liked students at the college.  But, in 1893, he became ill and died.  The funeral was one of the largest ever witnessed in Fort Wayne.  The touching story of Samuel Morris’ conversion, his zeal for education and his untimely end was widely told and attracted numerous new students to the college.

Because the college had been in serious financial trouble throughout the late 1880s, the legacy of Samuel Morris became crucial to the survival of the school.  When Fort Wayne Methodist College closed in 1894 and moved to Upland to begin a new life as Taylor University, one of its first two buildings was named Samuel Morris Hall in recognition of the spirit of Prince Kaboo.

Nearly a century later, Taylor University returned to Fort Wayne and opened a branch campus on the south side of the city.

Allen County Historian Tom Castaldi is author of the Wabash & Erie Canal Notebook series; hosts “On the Heritage Trail,” which is broadcast at 6:35 a.m., 8:35 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. Mondays on WBOI, 89.1 FM; and “Historia Nostra” heard on WLYV-1450 AM and WRRO 89.9 FM. Enjoy his previously published columns on the History Center’s blog, “Our Stories,” at history centerfw.blogspot.com. This entry is from "Along the Heritage Trail with Tom Castaldi", March 2006, No. 20.

The Civil War and Civil Rights

by Nancy McCammon-Hansen

In the July 19, 2013 edition of The Week magazine, an article appeared entitled “Glorifying the Civil War”. The work originally appeared in The Atlantic Magazine.

But the “glory” in the title is a misnomer as historians are increasingly looking at the negative impact the Civil War had on our nation. Historian David Goldfield goes so far as to say it was “America’s greatest failure”. Goldfield blames polarization around the issue of slavery as the downfall of our nation. The guilty parties in his eyes are politicians, extremists and evangelical Christians who created an atmosphere where compromise and reasoned debate became an impossibility.

“Unlike the revisionists of old,” states the article, “Goldfield sees slavery as the bedrock of the Southern cause and abolition as the war’s great achievement. But he argues that white supremacy was so entrenched, North and South, that war and Reconstruction could never deliver true racial justice to freed slaves, who soon became subject to economic peonage, Black Codes, Jim Crow, and rampant lynching.

“Nor did the war knit the nation back together. Instead, the South became a stagnant backwater, a resentful region that lagged and resisted the nation’s progress. It would take a century and the civil rights struggle for blacks to achieve legal equality, and for the South to emerge from poverty and isolation. ‘Emancipation and reunion, the two great results of this war, were badly compromised,’ Goldfield says. Given these equivocal gains, and the immense toll in blood and treasure, he asks: ‘Was the war worth it? No.’”.

Not all historians agree with Goldfield but views of the war are starting to change. Gary Gallagher says we have over-emphasized slavery and liberation in our views on Civil War era thinking. “There’s an Appomattox syndrome—we look at Northern victory and emancipation and read the evidence backward.”. In Gallagher’s view, most Northerners were fighting for the Union, not the end of slavery, and the Emancipation Proclamation was a measure of desperation designed to undermine the South.

The South came closer to winning the war, far closer than we are taught in most history classes, and “for the South, a tie was as good as a win”. The South “needed to inflict enough pain to convince a divided Northern public that defeating the South wasn’t worth the cost.”

Civil War casualties are the worst this nation has ever suffered. Soldiers didn’t wear dog tags, burial sites were sometimes unknown and casualty records sketchy or lost. The toll of 618,000, which has been the casualty figure for so long, is now being upped to 750,000. Civil War scholars agree with this figure determined by J. David Hacker, a demographic historian. A comparable war today would cost 7.5 million lives.

This figure also does not take into account soldiers who were disabled by amputation, ongoing disease, PTSD and other afflictions. Veterans did not speak of this and historians did not investigate. But Drew Gilpin Faust published in 2008 a work entitled The Republic of Suffering, citing the female view of the war.

“‘Civil War history has traditionally had a masculine view. It’s all about generals and statesmen and glory.’ From reading the letters of women during the war, though, she sensed the depth of Americans’ fear, grief, and despair. Writing her book amid ‘the daily drumbeat of loss’ in coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan, Faust’s focus on the horrors of this earlier war was reinforced.

“‘When we go to war, we ought to understand the costs,’ she says. ‘Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to forget that. Americans went into the Civil War imaging glorious battle, not gruesome disease and dismemberment.’”

Lincoln and others advocated for an approach to slavery that had been used in the British West Indies, whereby there would be a gradual and compensated emancipation of slaves. Brazil and Cuba would later use this approach.

“Economists have calculated that the cost of the Civil War, estimated at over $10 billion in 1860 dollars, would have been more than enough to buy the freedom of every slave, purchase them land, and even pay reparations. But Lincoln’s proposals for compensated emancipation fell on deaf ears.

“Nor is there much credible evidence that the South’s ‘peculiar institution’ would have peacefully waned on its own. Slave-grown cotton was booming in 1860, and slaves in non-cotton states like Virginia were being sold to Deep South planters at record prices, or put to work on railroads and in factories.

“Most historians believe that without the Civil War, slavery would have endured for decades, possibly generations. Though emancipation was a by-product of the war, not its aim, and white Americans clearly failed during Reconstruction to protect and guarantee the rights of freed slaves, the post-war amendments enshrined the promise of full citizenship and equality in the Constitution for later generations to fulfill.”

Southerners were able to capitalize on a “war weary” North where the attitude about black equality was “ambivalent about, if not hostile to, black equality”.

At Gettysburg in November 1863, Lincoln delivered his famous address. In it he urged “us the living” to dedicate ourselves to finishing the work of the Civil War. That’s where the Civil Rights Movement comes into play.

 

The lecturn King used when speaking in Fort Wayne.

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the nation on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, delivering his now famous “I Have a Dream” speech. This event was remembered across our nation and locally at the University of St. Francis auditorium downtown.

Audience members viewed the speech in its entirety and then a panel composed of Hanna Stith, Edward Smith and Larry Lee answered questions from Andrew Prall, Ph.D., Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Saint Francis.

Prall, Lee, Stith and Smith speak about the Civil Rights era in Fort Wayne.

Mrs. Stith is well-known around Fort Wayne for her role in the founding of the African/African-American Historical Society and for being one of the first black teachers in Fort Wayne. You can learn more about her at http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/hana-stith-39.

Smith founded Frost Illustrated and was relatively new to Fort Wayne in 1963. Learn more about him at http://www.thehistorymakers.com/sites/production/files/Story%20for%20Ink%20Newspapers%207-30-02.pdf.

Larry Lee was 19 in 1963 and was unable to attend the March on Washington because he needed his job and his construction foreman indicated time away would result in a job loss. He is now president of Leepoxy Plastics and has been a civil and human rights activist, participating in marches and demonstrations, including Rallies for Justice in Meridian and Philadelphia, MS. He also initiated the grass-roots movement to rename Clinton Street “Martin Luther King Boulevard” and has served the Fort Wayne Urban League, United Hispanic Americans and Martin Luther King Club boards. http://www.ipfw.edu/microsites/uc2/events/fw-civil-rights.html

In King’s speech, the Civil Rights leader said he “refused to believe the bank of justice is bankrupt” and that “now is the time to make justice a reality”. He warned against violence and said blacks must “meet physical violence with soul force”.

“We must not be guilty of wrongful deeds.”

Prall asked the panel where they were on August 28, 1963.

Smith did not attend the march but remembers the Fort Wayne movement to make buses available for local residents to attend. Stith was the mother of a 7-year old who watched on television with her. Stith reminisced about she and her brothers selling papers and learning “to read early”.

“So many ugly things were happening. I was a very good friend of Dr. Bernard Stuart, president of the NAACP in Fort Wayne.” Stuart went to Washington with others from our city. “It was about time somebody do something,” said Stith.

Lee added that “everything the march intended to do came to pass” but we knew “anything could happen” since whites were more concerned about the potential for violence. But Smith countered that “no one was thinking of violence” in the black community.

A number of white Hollywood stars supported the March on Washington including Charlton Heston, Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Shelley Winters, James Garner, Tony Bennett and Steve McQueen.

Stith, in talking about Fort Wayne in 1963, said, “This was a very prejudiced community but there were a lot of good people here too.” She particularly singled out the Unitarian House, Margaret Ann Keegan, Ian Rolland, Larry Hayes, the Urban League and the NAACP.

“We had good white involvement.”

Lee seconded Rolland’s involvement and Hayes, who was editor of the Journal Gazette, for his “goodwill for the march”. Leonard Goldstine was also among those recognized for his work.

But Stith added that there was a “sheer absence of white churches” in response to segregation and civil rights issues in Fort Wayne and wished that there had been “more stalwart support”. However, in her view, the March on Washington “helped the community. We’ve seen some improvements in this community. But things have not come easy for us.”

Lee, who is white, spoke emphatically about the “venomous bias and hatred that was tolerated” in the area and that signs in “Mom and Pop” stores stating “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone” were blatant anti-black statements.

Smith explained that clergy, doctors, lawyers and other black professionals were out in front of the local civil rights movement because anyone working in a factory job or had other employment that was affiliated with a union was fearful of losing his job.

“The unions had to support you.”

Many of the speakers who followed the panel, and panel members themselves, voiced the idea that respect for others and a focus on character rather than skin color are necessary for our nation even today.

And in summing up King’s address and the March on Washington, Stith said, “They had no idea it would be the success it was. This speech runs circles around the Gettysburg Address.”

John Ross McCulloch

One of the most notable homes remaining in the central business district of Fort Wayne is John Ross McCulloch’s House at 334 East Berry Street.  In its heyday, from the 1880s to the 1940s, this was the finest home on the east side.

The family name always associated with the house – McCulloch – was itself a prominent feature of the community’s past.  The house, one of the few remaining examples of Gothic Revival architecture in Fort Wayne, was built in 1883 by Charles McCulloch but was intended for his son, John Ross.  Charles McCulloch, the son of Hugh McCulloch, Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Chester A. Arthur, was president of the Hamilton National Bank, the predecessor of National City Bank.

J. Ross McCulloch was born in 1869 and he, too, went into banking.  But the tastes of this McCulloch were often very different from those of his ancestors.  Educated in Washington, D.C., and at the Irving Institute in New York, Ross spent his entire adult life in one half of the duplex on Berry Street.  In later years his partner in the east half of the house was Charles Weatherhogg, an English architect who came to Fort Wayne in 1894 and who, before his death in 1937, designed many of the major early twentieth-century buildings in Fort Wayne.

McCulloch’s other interest lay in the arts.  He served as the president of the Fort Wayne Community Concert Association, which eventually became the Fort Wayne Philharmonic Orchestra.  His first love, however, was for the theatre and painting.  Michigan artist Robert Grafton created murals in his home, and Ross became an active member of a local theatre group.

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Allen County Historian Tom Castaldi is author of the Wabash & Erie Canal Notebook series; hosts “On the Heritage Trail,” which is broadcast at 6:35 a.m., 8:35 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. Mondays on WBOI, 89.1 FM; and “Historia Nostra” heard on WLYV-1450 AM and WRRO 89.9 FM. Enjoy his previously published columns on the History Center’s blog, “Our Stories,” at history centerfw.blogspot.com. Our thanks to Fort Wayne Monthly for allowing us to re-publish articles that have appeared in their magazine.