Mad Anthony Wayne and the Birth of the Fort
Near Fort Wayne, Indiana
On September seventeenth, seventeen ninety four, General Anthony Wayne marched his army into the smoldering ruins of Kekionga. The Miami capital was empty. After Fallen Timbers, its residents had fled. Wayne looked at the confluence of three rivers and saw exactly what his enemies had seen for centuries: a perfect strategic position.
Within a month, his men had built a substantial log fort on the riverbank, capable, Wayne boasted, of withstanding twenty-four-pound cannon. He named it Fort Wayne. He was forty-nine years old, in poor health, and had been fighting this war for three years. He died just two years later, of gout, at age fifty one, on the shores of Lake Erie.
The fort he left behind had an eventful life. The first structure deteriorated quickly and a second fort replaced it in eighteen hundred, built about three hundred feet away by Colonel Thomas Hunt. That second fort survived the War of eighteen twelve, when a combined Potawatomi and Miami force besieged it for a week in September of eighteen twelve. The garrison held. General William Henry Harrison arrived with reinforcements and the siege broke.
A third fort followed in eighteen fifteen, designed from drawings by Major John Whistler. That final structure stood until the city simply grew past it.
Today the reconstructed version you can visit opened to the public in nineteen seventy six, built using Whistler's original eighteen fourteen drawings. It stands a quarter mile from where Wayne's first logs went up, but the ground it occupies carries the same meaning: this is where the American republic planted its flag at the heart of the continent, and refused to leave.
