Fighting It Out Along the Wabash--Part One

by Harry Tunnell

According to Indiana’s Department of Natural Resources, the Wabash River is the state’s most famous river.  It rises in Ohio and flows for 30 miles or so before it becomes an Indiana river, running about 450 miles through the state to the Ohio River and border with Illinois.  Known for its scenic beauty, the river inspired On the Banks of the Wabash, the state song of Indiana.  What is less known about the river is the martial side to its history.  During the early years of the American Republic, United States and Indian armies spent decades fighting it out along the Wabash.  Two of the most noteworthy battles near the Wabash River occurred in 1791 and 1811.  The fight in 1791 was one of the greatest failures of American arms.  The 1811 battle, in contrast, was an important victory.

General Josiah Harmar led an American army on campaign against a Miami-Shawnee Indian Confederacy led by Little Turtle (Miami) and Blue Jacket (Shawnee) in 1790.  Harmar’s force was defeated by the Indians in a series of engagements near present-day Churubusco and Fort Wayne, IN.  In response, General Arthur St. Clair was ordered by President Washington to lead a punitive expedition against the confederacy.  The army was organized at Fort Washington (present-day Cincinnati, OH) during March 1791.  Originally intending to conduct a summer campaign, St. Clair and the army were delayed due to a variety of organizational problems.  The army, composed of more than 1,400 regulars and militia, departed in October, plagued by poor training, inadequate logistics, and dreadful discipline.  The army moved north toward the large Indian towns in northeastern Indiana—the destruction of which was their objective.

By November, the army had dwindled to less than 1,000 personnel due to desertion and other problems.  On the evening of November 3, 1791, the American army encamped on high ground near the banks of the Wabash River (present-day Fort Recovery, OH), but failed to establish adequate defensive works.  During the early morning hours of November 4, 1791, the encampment was attacked and overrun by an Indian army.  According to William Wells, a participant in the battle, the Indians scalped and tomahawked until they could no longer raise their arms—the American army suffered 632 killed and 264 wounded.  Indian casualties were comparatively light, with 66 killed and 9 wounded.  The battle, known as St. Clair’s Defeat, is the worst thrashing of American arms in the 100-year history of the Indian wars.  (By comparison, 263 Americans were killed at Custer’s last stand.)  What remained of St. Clair’s command eventually struggled back to Fort Washington.  Rather than being subdued as President Washington wished, the Indian Confederacy was emboldened.  It would take another American army, led by General Anthony Wayne, to defeat the Miami-Shawnee Confederacy in August 1794 at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.

Earliest Rails in Fort Wayne

by Tom Castaldi

Before the 1830s, Fort Wayne and the surrounding countryside depended heavily on the fur trade industry.  With the arrival of the Wabash & Erie Canal, Fort Wayne emerged as the hub of a thriving transportation system.  Ironically, the canal was instrumental in the construction of the first railways in Fort Wayne, which became a railroading center in the Midwest.  In 1852, along the canal at the present-day railroad elevation which boarders the south edge of Headwaters Park at Lafayette Street, the first locomotive was unloaded from a canal flatboat.

Placed on tracks that were laid on Lafayette Street, the steam engine headed to the south side of town where the main line of the new Ohio and Indiana Railroad was due to be built to Crestline, Ohio.  Later this became the Pennsylvania Railroad system for which Fort Wayne once again enjoyed the position as a major hub. The tracks remained in place on Lafayette Street until 1857 when a depot, freight house, and other structures located on the canal towpath were transferred to the new locations on the south side of town.

In 1874, a boat on the old canal was becoming a rare sight, even though a few did in fact officially operate over short stretches of water.  With the spring of 1875, however, came floods and down the line boats that sank into the muddy bottom often were left to rot away.  When railroad competition had reduced the effectiveness of the canal, a circuit court in Chicago ordered the canal sold in 1876 and it was acquired by William Fleming a local newspaper publisher, public office holder and entrepreneur.

Shortly, surveys for a rail line extended north of Fort Wayne were underway, and in 1881, officials of the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad, known commonly as “The Nickel Plate Road,” purchased the old Wabash & Erie right-of-way through central Fort Wayne.  Construction of the railroad on the site of the old canal channel was going strong from 1881 to 1882.

It has been said that New York, Chicago & St. Louis was the only railroad company in the United States built for cash in advance of the issue of stocks and bonds.  The subscribers to the founding syndicate agreed to furnish the money in ten percent calls as fast as required.  It became possible for the company to build a railroad through a sizable Midwestern city, passing less that two blocks from the county courthouse, without having to raze one building.

While the Nickel Plate put Fort Wayne on another major east-west trunk line, the railroad also divided the city, discouraging growth on the north side. The Journal-Gazette broadcast on its daily masthead: “Why Wait? Let’s Elevate!” and the call to “Elevate the Nickel Plate” became a community issue throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

In 1947 the City of Fort Wayne signed an agreement with the railroad to elevate the tracks, but it was not until 1953 that ground was broke for the project. Temporary tracks were laid and construction of the elevation itself began on August 27, 1954; the project was completed on July 29, 1956, inaugurating an era of expansion to the north of the city.  The railroad elevation allowed the north side of the city to develop and grow rapidly. Today, it is a landmark structure between the downtown portion of Fort Wayne and that of Headwaters Park.

This article originally appeared in Fort Wayne Magazine “Along the Heritage Trail with Tom Castaldi” – June 2007. 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.

Stained glass in History

by Nancy McCammon-Hansen

 As we prepare to have new windows installed in our building this spring, we are taking a look at our exhibits to determine what will be done with them as the workmen remove old windows and install new. The weather being what it’s been this year, we’re conscious of rain, wind, (but hopefully not snow!) as well as security for our artifacts. In the process of cleaning and doing some maintenance on exhibits earlier this month, we found that with a little re-arranging in our downstairs galleries, we were able to once again put on display a stained glass window from the chapel that was once in the original convent at St. Joe Hospital. St. Joe was founded by the Poor Handmaids of Jesus in 1869 in the former Rockhill House hotel located on the southwest corner of Broadway and Main Streets.

The window uncovered--you are looking toward Barr Street.

Randy Elliott, exhibitor, and Karen Butler-Clary, registrar, examine and clean the window.

Close up of one of the panels.

Stained glass was used in the Far East as long ago as 306 B.C. With the birth of Gothic architecture, stained glass became more common and “.. the full value of glass as a transmitter of light and a polychromatic decorative material was fully appreciated. Gothic window-openings called for a filling strong enough to keep out the weather, yet transparent enough to admit the light; on the other hand, as, in this form of architecture, the wall-spaces were necessarily small, the windows offered the only opportunity for the decorator's art in so far as it depended upon colour. As glass at that time was to be had only in small pieces, the glazier was compelled, in order to fill the window-openings, to make his lights a mosaic, that is a combination of pieces of glass of various sizes and colours worked to a given design by placing them in juxtaposition. These pieces of glass had to be kept in place by some other material, and the best medium for the purpose was found to be lead, applied in strips made with lateral grooves for the reception of the edges of the glass.”

Ref: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14241a.htm

One of the best examples of the use of stained glass can be found in Chartres Cathedral in Chartes, France. Here is a photo I took several years ago of just one of many stained glass windows there. If you go to France, you must go to Chartres, if for no other reason than to see this Cathedral.

The website http://www4.uwm.edu/letsci/arthistory/StainedGlass/history.cfm provides more information on stained glass if you’d like to do further study. The information below was written by Shannon Fitzgerald.

In the Romanesque Period of the 12^th Century, “the relatively small windows of the period were designed to admit as much light as possible. Thus, images made with predominantly red and blue glass were then surrounded by white glass. In the Gothic Period of the 13th - 14th Century, more geometrical shapes were incorporated into windows and decorative borders employed.

“The emergence of the Rose Window at St. Denis Cathedral and Chartres Cathedral, both in France, greatly influences the field throughout Europe as providing a means to depict more complex ideas as embellishments in Biblical narrative become prevalent.


“Stained glass witnessed its greatest diversity in design, style, palette and sentiment during the Gothic period. This diversity in approach combined with the skilled artistry that developed with the formation of regulated guilds and a wide array of technological advances elevated the medium to a position of preeminence that would remain unsurpassed.”


During the Reformation in the sixteen century, glass makers sought more secular commissions as the making of religious imagery came with severe penalties. Many stained glass windows were destroyed in churches including those in France and England.


“With the emergence of enamels in the sixteenth century, glaziers began to imitate Renaissance painters and applied thick coats of enamel to the surface, as if painting a canvas. Also, transparent glass gave way to heavily painted opaque glass. The more this was practiced, the more distant old stained glass techniques became. The artistry and skill, that had reached their zenith during the Gothic period, became a lost art. During the nineteenth century Sir Joshua Reynolds and other luminaries completely disregarded the medium and continued using enamel in this vein. For approximately two hundred years stained glass fell out of favor due to massive destruction, religious iconoclasm, preference for Renaissance styles, the rise in enamels usage, and a lack of knowledge of old techniques. Stained glass was not widely produced and did not again receive critical attention until its revival in the nineteenth century.”


Many of Fort Wayne’s older churches have stained glass windows. Here are a few photos from Trinity Episcopal Church, at the corner of Fulton and Berry, which was completed around the time of the end of the Civil War. If you have photos of local stained glass windows in our community that you would like to share with the History Center’s Facebook followers, please send them to nancy.mccammon-hansen@fwhistorycenter.com.

Picture Post Card Collections

by Nancy McCammon-Hansen

Randy Harter will be at the History Center on January 25 to share parts of his postcard collection and autograph copies of his book about Fort Wayne post cards. Randy Elliott, our exhibitor, shared with me some boxes of postcards from the History Center’s archives so we thought it would be fun to share a few scans of those and to tell you more about the history of postcards. Walter Font, our curator, loaned me his book “A History of Postcards” by Martin Willoughby so information in this post comes primarily come from that work.

Picture postcards are only about 120 years old, so in historical terms they are a relatively new phenomenon. I collect post cards of places where we visit because the quality of the post card photograph is usually excellent and sometimes there are shots that I could not possibly get with my Nikons. But at one time, buying and sending a post card from a vacation spot was just one small piece of post card history, “a time when sending postcards was so popular, indeed on the verge of an international addiction, that the seaside-holiday variety was just the tip of the iceberg…..The postal authorities who produced the first rather drab, plain ‘postal’ or ‘correspondence-cards’ doubtless could not have foreseen the extent to which their basic ideas would be grasped and developed—evolving, within a couple of decades, into items that would be recognized and used by everyone the world over.”

West Berry Street from Fulton

The first “official” postcards went on sale in 1860. Not particularly popular at first, people soon realized that they were cheaper to mail than a letter, using less paper and postage (and if you don’t like to write—less words!). Businesses capitalized on postcards for advertising purposes and were among the first to utilize photos on postcards.

Centlivre Brewing Company

In the 1890s, the “Greetings from….” postcards made their appearance. At the turn of the century, the “golden age” of the postcard began. You no longer needed a reason to send a postcard as the artwork could be the reason, which people who hate to write letters probably really appreciated!

Then collecting began. Postcards, as Harter will tell you, have the benefit of being a collection you can acquire “en masse” because they don’t take up much room. 

According to Willoughby, “…it is difficult to discern whether postcard collecting was a result of the increase in the use of postcards or whether the increase in their use came about because people started collecting them. The extremely large quantities in use were proof of how popular they had become…” Postcards were a cost cutting device, cheaper than stationery and envelopes, cheaper to mail by half that of a letter and some postcards even came with the postage pre-printed, which made mailing them even easier over letters. And postcards were efficient—there’s only so much room on them and what we would now text message or tweet, people would put on postcards and send. Plus, mail between towns close to one another sometimes occurred within two or three hours of mailing your card. The increased use of telephones changed the appeal, but in the early 1900s the telephone was not as common as it is today. Thus the “golden age” of the picture postcard was almost two decades in length.

Barr Street Market in its hey day.

Inside of the market.

Another view of the market

World War I saw fewer “frivolous” art pieces and more patriotic works on postcards and many artists became better known as their works were mailed across the country. By the end of the war, picture postcards began a decline. The country was in a more serious mood and postal rates had risen. The 1920s saw the advent of Art Deco graphics and some new postcards featuring motion picture stars. But the Depression came along and the era of massive postcard mailing and collecting sharply declined.

In the late 1960s, collecting picked up as persons seeking to preserve history saw the appeal of large collections which took up little space and were representative of a piece of Americana that was unique. In the 1970s and 80s, postcard publishing saw a resurgence as an art form and you often see postcards for sale today in shops, such as the History Center’s gift shop. 

“However, it is fairly certain we will never again reach the stage where, as in those few years either side of 1900, the craze for sending postcards took over the world.”