Current Time in Fort Wayne, United States

Fort Wayne stands in north-eastern Indiana, at the point where the St. Joseph and St. Marys rivers meet to form the Maumee, which flows on to Lake Erie. With about two hundred and seventy thousand residents it is the second largest city in Indiana, the centre of a metropolitan area of well over four hundred thousand people and the commercial capital of a wide farming region.

The confluence has been strategically important for a very long time. It was the site of Kekionga, the principal town of the Miami people, and it commanded the short portage between the Great Lakes and the rivers running to the Mississippi, making it one of the key gateways of the North American interior. That importance brought conflict: American expeditions were defeated nearby in 1790 and 1791, and after the Battle of Fallen Timbers a fort was built in 1794 under General Anthony Wayne, giving the city its name. The Wabash and Erie Canal arrived in the 1830s, the railroads followed, and Fort Wayne became a manufacturing city known for electrical machinery, wire, trucks and later electronics.

Its industrial history includes some notable firsts. The first professional baseball game played under electric lights took place here in 1883, the inventor Philo Farnsworth developed television technology in Fort Wayne laboratories in the 1930s and 1940s, and the professional basketball team founded by a local piston manufacturer eventually moved to Detroit, where it kept the name Pistons. The vast electrical works that once dominated the west side have been reborn as Electric Works, a campus of offices, laboratories, food halls and classrooms.

Visitors find an unusually strong set of attractions for a city of this size. The Fort Wayne Children's Zoo is regularly ranked among the best in the country, the Foellinger-Freimann Botanical Conservatory offers a desert house and seasonal displays under glass in the middle of downtown, and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art and Science Central serve art and science audiences. The restored Embassy Theatre, a 1928 movie palace with a working pipe organ, hosts the philharmonic and touring shows, and Parkview Field, home of the TinCaps minor league baseball team, is considered one of the finest small ballparks in America. The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library holds one of the largest family history collections in the world and attracts researchers from every state.

John Chapman, the orchardist remembered as Johnny Appleseed, is buried here, and a large festival in his honour fills the riverside park each September, joined by the summer Three Rivers Festival and a revitalised riverfront promenade.

Interstate highways, a busy international airport and a regional health care sector centred on several large hospital systems support the economy, and Purdue University Fort Wayne, the University of Saint Francis and Indiana University programmes educate thousands of students.

Affordable, friendly and quietly full of history, Fort Wayne is a rewarding Midwestern city.