Polaroid photograph of one of the blockhouses at Historic Fort Wayne.

The city of Fort Wayne, Indiana's second largest city, started out as a wooden stockade fort built by the United States Army on the orders of General Anthony Wayne in 1794. At that time, the place where the Saint Joseph River and Saint Marys River join to form the Maumee River was the site of a Native American town called Kekionga. It was the capital of the Miami, the tribe that controlled most of northern Indiana and northwest Ohio.

General Wayne had just defeated a coalition of several tribes under Miami leadership at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in northwest Ohio, near the modern city of Maumee (a suburb of Toledo). White settlers began moving into northeast Indiana, and Kekionga became the town of Fort Wayne.

Historic Fort Wayne is a reconstruction of the third Fort Wayne, built in 1815. The fort was used only a few years; the army closed the fort and removed its garrison in 1819. The reconstructed fort was built in 1976 to celebrate the American Bicentennial, and was operated as a museum with employees and volunteers in period costumes. The museum closed in the early 1990s and the fort was left abandoned. In 2004 a new nonprofit group formed to restore the deteriorating structure. It is now open a couple weekends a month.

The fort stands on a piece of land between the Saint Marys River on the west and Spy Run Avenue on the east. The grassy embankment around the fort was not part of the original 1815 fort; it was added as part of the city's flood control system. You can see a bit of the modern city in the background, where Fort Wayne's tallest building, the 27 story Indiana-Michigan Power Center, is visible above the trees. Historic Fort Wayne is on the northern edge of the city's 'downtown' area.

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