The Old Aqueduct Club
Near Fort Wayne, Indiana
Across the front of this little statue are three words. Let's go swimming. The figures are two barefoot boys in old-fashioned coveralls, and they remember a vanished Fort Wayne.
Long ago a covered aqueduct carried the Wabash and Erie Canal across the Saint Marys River right around here, and the boys of the west side swam in its waters. In nineteen twelve, after the canal era had ended, those same men, now grown, formed the Old Aqueduct Club. The rules were simple.
To join, you had to have lived on the west side before the eighteen seventies and to have actually gone swimming in the old canal. At its height the club had as many as five hundred members. They erected this statue in nineteen twenty-seven.
By the nineteen fifties only a handful were left, and soon after, the club quietly faded away.
