The story
Welcome to Wolf Lake
Wolf Lake was laid out in 1836 on the shore of the lake it is named for, on the old road from Fort Wayne to Goshen. It hoped to be the county seat and never was, but in its early years it did more business than any town in the county, and from 1929 to 1961 it had a country hospital of its own.
Noble Township holds the first white settlement in the county: Joel Bristol, with his wife’s nephew Isaac Tibbot and the other Tibbot children, located on a farm three and a half miles southeast of the future village on April 4, 1827. Tibbot remembered that their nearest neighbor toward Fort Wayne was six miles away and that they saw for weeks “no human being except our own family and the natives.” On October 8, 1833, Andrew Stewart was already keeping a hotel where Wolf Lake now stands and Jacob Haines was running a blacksmith shop.
In April 1836 Patrick C. Miller and Andrew Stewart had seventy-one lots surveyed on the northwest quarter of section 9 and named the village after the lake on whose banks it lay; Wayne Street and Wolf Lake Street were ninety-nine feet wide. Thomas Smith, Sr., sold the first goods, in a little building of tamarack poles where Mrs. Stephens had taught the township’s first school in the winter of 1834–35. A post office came about 1837, with Pat Miller as postmaster, on the mail route from Fort Wayne to Niles. The village was meant to be the county seat, and the commissioners sent to relocate it met at Miller’s house on July 3, 1837, but the seat went elsewhere.
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Growth came slowly at first, with six families in 1840 and twenty-five or thirty a few years later. Merchants such as Hiram Morgan, John R. Cook and David S. Scott bought grain, wool and pork in quantity, and the 1882 history wrote that “in early years more business was done there than in any other town in the county.” W. W. Noteman opened a cabinet shop in 1840 and in sixteen years made, among much else, 1,400 coffins. The first church, Baptist, was built in 1841 for the use of all denominations.
When news of Fort Sumter reached the village in April 1861, its citizens met at George W. Matthews’s hotel, took down the Republican campaign pole, stripped it of its emblems and raised it again as a Union pole; old Matthews, “without a tooth in his head,” offered himself as the first volunteer. Company C of the 30th Indiana stopped at Wolf Lake on its march to Fort Wayne for a dinner in the old Baptist church, and Company G of the 44th Indiana was made up chiefly of Wolf Lake men.
Wolf Lake never had a railroad; in 1920 its nearest shipping point was Kimmell, six miles off, and its population about 220. The muck land around it was then counted among the best onion-growing districts of the central states, and traffic on the Fort Wayne–Goshen road, later U.S. 33 and the Lincoln Highway, ran through the village. Dr. James E. Luckey, who practiced at Wolf Lake from about 1893, opened the brick Luckey Hospital in 1929; it served the countryside until 1961 and is now a medical museum. Noble Township counted 3,011 people in 2020.