Outpost in the Wilderness: Fort Wayne, 1706-1828

by Charles Poinsatte
Allen County, Fort Wayne Historical Society 1976
There was a time when the writer of local history and the academic professional were two different people; indeed, one is almost tempted to say, they were two different species. Fortunately for both, this is no longer true. Many academic historians now recognize local units as the fundamental units of historical study, presenting hard data in manageable quantities for precise conclusions. Charles R. Poinsatte was among the first to recognize this and merge the academic and local traditions of historical writing, the one supplying rigor and judgments based on cosmopolitan learning, and the other supplying the vividness and appeal of the familiar and relevant.
On the academic side, Charles R. Poinsatte got his undergraduate and graduate education at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend. Thomas T. McAvoy schooled him to precision in judgment and exhaustiveness in research. Poinsatte also had the good fortune to study under Aaron I. Abell, a student of Arthur Schlesinger, Senior, whose 1933 book, The Rise of the City, 1878-1898 , initiated a new kind of American history. Professor Abell first got Poinsatte interested in what is now called urban history. In fact, however, Poinsatte’s career embodies still another great tradition in American historiography, that of frontier history as inspired by Frederick Jackson Turner. Frontier Outpost describes the site of an urban area to be, but it is not truly urban history, as Dr. Poinsatte’s book, Fort Wayne during the Canal Era, 1828-1855 (Indiana Historical Bureau, 1969), was. Thus Dr. Poinsatte writes in this book of Fort Wayne as an aspect principally of the history of the Old Northwest.
Higher education at Notre Dame, acquaintance with a student of the elder Schlesinger, and thoughts spurred by the Turner thesis are only part of the story, of course. The area Dr. Poinsatte decided to study was Fort Wayne and not Detroit or Chicago or Cincinnati. Here what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “a sort of home-feeling with the past” worked its magic. Born in Fort Wayne in 1925, Charles Poinsatte was stirred by the names he heard as a boy, Little Turtle, Anthony Wayne, and George Rogers Clarke. Some family property was part of the old Richardville estate, and in his youth he explored an old Indian burial ground there. He has never gotten over his fascination with those men, and now he examines them with his academic tools.