Fort Wayne, Indiana

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 83rd-most populous city in the U.S. The Fort Wayne metropolitan area, consisting of Allen 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.

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.

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.

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.