The last known photo of the Statue of Father Agatho the River-Minded. Taken in 1924, at the confluence of the Maumee River and the Saints Mary and Joseph downtown Fort Wayne. Photographer unknown.
Father Agatho, Father of the Rivers, was a Jesuit Catholic priest who traveled to the frontier town of Fort Wayne in the mid-1820s to convert the natives. Having grown up in England near the River Thames, Agatho felt a deep spiritual connection with rivers, citing it as a holy union of nature and man, through its ability to provide active transport.
As he set east from Buffalo, NY in late winter of 1823, he was taken captive by the Miami tribe in what is now central Ohio. After living among a group of Miami for six months, Father Agatho, who had a penchant for languages, learned how to speak with them. He told them about Jesus Christ, provided oral accounts of stories from the Bible, and about his connections with the rivers. While the Christian mythology never stuck with the Miami, the love of rivers did.
The Miami took him upstream to the confluence of three rivers in what is now Fort Wayne, Indiana. He was so overcome by joy at being at the “center of the Most Holy of Places east of the Mighty Atlantic” (according an account in his journals), that he fell to the ground, overcome.
Eyewitness accounts from the Miami tribe say that Father Agatho then stood at the confluence, and named the rivers: Two rivers, flowing from the north and the south, he named after Mary, mother of Jesus, and Joseph, her husband. In honor of the people who took him to this holy place, he named the river they flowed into the Maumee (a mis-pronunciation of “Miami”, for they had no written translation until decades later).
This statue was erected in the late-1800s by the Catholic Diocese of Fort Wayne/South Bend to honor Father Agatho. Though he was denied sainthood by the Holy See multiple times, the Church authorized a bronze statue in his honor. Though there are trees blocking the river now, when it was erected, there was only a clear view of the river. Merchants and fur-traders boating up the Maumee are said to have used it as a navigation point in their travels to Toledo, hundreds of miles down the Maumee.
In the spring of 1925, a torrential rain and F5-classified tonado ripped the statue from its foundation as it passed through the city, killing hundreds and leaving a clear path of destruction in its wake. Though it was never to be found, in 1957, Vilma Grilbert of New Haven, IN (a neighboring community of Fort Wayne) claimed to have found the index finger of his extended right hand buried in her yard, as she was digging a flower garden. Its identity was never verified, as the original casting and plans for the statue were lost decades before.
Dan Greeley, a Fort Wayne historian, has collected accounts of the statue’s disappearance. One local church published a prayer to Father Agatho:
Oh holy man who was taken unto the rivers,
Watch over us and give God counsul.
The rains and the winds that are His Will,
Our very existence can give and take.Amen.
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