On a Saturday morning this coming May, the gates of Fort Wayne's old Swinney Homestead will swing open once more, and on a knoll at the foot of West Jefferson Boulevard a cluster of costumed guides will tell the story of a house, a family, and the extraordinary gift that turned a private pioneer estate into a public trust. The Swinney Homestead Open House & Plant Sale, scheduled for May 2 from 10 a.m. to noon at 1424 West Jefferson Boulevard, is a free walk-through tour of the Swinney House, the adjacent log house, and the Settlers' Herb Garden, led by members of Settlers, Inc., the nonprofit group that has called the property home for more than four decades.
The centerpiece of that morning is a structure that began in 1844 as a modest Federal-style farmhouse and grew into something grander, in step with its owner's ambitions. Colonel Thomas W. Swinney, born in Piketon, Ohio in 1803, arrived in Fort Wayne shortly before 1824 as a young land speculator eager to develop the west end of the frontier town. Soon after his arrival he married Lucy Taber, the daughter of Paul Tabor, a War of 1812 sea captain turned speculator, and Lucy brought to the marriage a dowry of 240 acres of land. The couple's house was begun in 1844 and they moved in the following year; the original residence consisted of a single story with four basic rooms, while the basement held seven small rooms and a large space used as the kitchen. In 1885, a second story, a wing, and a rear portion were added, pushing the house toward the Italianate style then in vogue. After Swinney's death, his daughters remodeled the house, adding the Eastlake porch, the paired brackets, and the central wall dormer that simulates an Italianate tower.
Behind the house stands an earlier piece of history: a log cabin built around 1826, a reminder of the raw frontier in which Swinney made his fortune. The house itself is notable not only for its architecture — Federal at its core, Italianate in its Victorian skin, with tulip poplar flooring — but for the landscape of events its grounds witnessed. The west-end lands Swinney held, which encompass today's West Swinney Park, served for decades as the gathering place of the entire community. On July 4, 1843, hundreds of people from Fort Wayne and the surrounding region converged there to celebrate the grand opening of the Wabash and Erie Canal, the longest canal ever built in North America. Its groundbreaking had been held on the very same ground in 1832, and in that election year the presidential candidate Lewis Cass came to make laudatory speeches alongside state and local notables. Peter Kaiser, one of Fort Wayne's earliest German settlers and a butcher, presided over a free barbecue of four great oxen driven up from Logansport — beasts that, according to local lore, sensibly refused to board a canal boat for their final journey.
The property continued to host the life of the growing city. In 1874, the Allen County Fair was established on the grounds, complete with a half-mile race track and the usual pens and corrals, and the annual September fair was held there for many years. In 1889, the first Labor Day celebration took place on the Swinney grounds, and labor leaders long regarded the area as special to working people.
The legacy of the property was fixed in Thomas Swinney's will. When he died on January 20, 1875, he decreed that once his direct line of issue expired, the homestead tract of 614 acres was to be used as a public park, with the provision that his remaining children could have lifetime occupancy of the house. His daughters — Rhesa, Frances, and Caroline — allowed the city to take early possession of the land in 1893 for the development of Swinney Park, and the Swinney family continued to occupy the house until 1922. As a park, the grounds became famous for the Japanese Gardens, renamed the Jaenicke Gardens shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and for picnic grounds and a country setting, with other portions of the western lands acquired by the city in 1918 and a public swimming pool added. Some acres were leased to the entertainment entrepreneur George Trier, who developed the amusement destination known into the mid-twentieth century as "Trier's Park," complete with a roller coaster, bumper cars, and dance halls, until a great fire swept through in 1953.
When the last of Swinney's daughters had died and the city took full ownership, the Homestead's second chapter began. The house became the Museum of the Allen County-Fort Wayne Historical Society, which occupied it in 1924, and for more than half a century it housed the region's story until the museum relocated in the late 1970s to the Old City Hall at Barr and Berry streets. Then, in 1980, a group known as Settlers, Inc. leased the house and made it their home. Settlers, Inc. had been founded in 1971 by costumed volunteers devoted to researching the domestic arts and crafts of early America — their politics, history, folklore, and the skills needed to survive in the pioneer era. They moved into the Swinney House, which is owned by the City of Fort Wayne, and began teaching classes in its historical rooms while simultaneously undertaking the restoration of the building, which had been listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981.
Since then, the Swinney Homestead has been Settlers' headquarters and living classroom. Money raised through memberships, classes, the gift shoppe on the second floor of the house, the Johnny Appleseed Festival, the Speakers' Bureau, and special events goes to the restoration and maintenance of the historic landmark. Among their proudest projects is the Settlers' Herb Garden, maintained by a dedicated group of members whose carefully tended herbs are used in Settler activities. A walk through that garden, kept beside the old house, is part of what the May open house offers visitors, along with the log house and the main residence.
The open house is a chance to experience the Homestead in exactly the spirit its founder intended. Swinney's will directed that the land "remain open and free to the public," making it the first land donated for park purposes to the city of Fort Wayne. On the grounds, careful visitors can also find living tributes to the family that started it all: a tulip tree planted at the Homestead echoes the tulip poplars that were plentiful in early Fort Wayne and yielded the wood flooring of the 1844 house, while a sycamore tree planted in recent years honors Lucy Swinney, who is said to have planted a sycamore near the spot to commemorate her marriage to Thomas in 1827.
Members of Settlers, Inc. will be on hand on May 2 to share these histories — the canal celebrations and oxen roasts, the fairs and Labor Day gatherings, the decades of museum life, and the years of patient restoration. The tours are free, the house and garden open to anyone who wants to walk the same ground where Fort Wayne's first civic pageants unfolded. For those curious to learn more, Settlers, Inc. can be reached at 424-7212, and its website, settlersinc.org, offers details on programs and tours throughout the year. On that Saturday morning, two hours given to wandering through the Swinney House, the log cabin, and the herb garden are also time spent with the memory of Thomas and Lucy Swinney and the generosity that kept their frontier estate open and free to the public, just as they wished, for nearly two centuries.