On a Sunday morning on Fort Wayne’s south side, the parking lots fill before the strip-mall storefronts do. Families in long Chin puan wraps and Sunday suits cross Anthony Boulevard with Bibles in Hakha and Falam. Inside a former Baptist sanctuary, the hymns rise in a language that travelled here through India, then Malaysia, then a Thai border camp, and finally to Indiana. By April, the same families will be soaked head to foot at a Thingyan water festival in a temple yard off Decatur Road, laughing in three languages at once.
Fort Wayne is home to the largest Burmese community in the United States. It is also, by most counts, the largest Chin community anywhere outside Myanmar itself.
Fort Wayne, The Place
Fort Wayne sits in the northeast corner of Indiana, 125 miles up the road from Indianapolis, where the St. Joseph and St. Marys rivers meet to form the Maumee. It is Indiana’s second-largest city, a quiet brick-and-limestone manufacturing town built on the back of German and Irish industrial labour.
The Burmese neighbourhoods cluster on the southeast side, in the 46806, 46807 and 46816 zip codes, along South Calhoun Street, South Anthony Boulevard, Decatur Road and Tillman Road. They are streets of small bungalows, post-war ranches, plain Baptist church plants and family-run groceries with hand-painted signs in three scripts.
How Fort Wayne Became Burmese
Before the Burmese
The fort itself was built in 1794 by General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, on top of the old Miami village of Kekionga at the river junction. By the mid-1800s the Wabash and Erie Canal had turned the town into a Midwest depot, and German skilled labour poured in to staff the factories. By the First World War, Allen County was 60 to 70 percent German. Polish, Irish and a smaller Italian wave followed.
The southeast side of Fort Wayne, where the Burmese now live, has always been the city’s blue-collar landing strip. German Lutherans, Italian Catholics, Black families during the Great Migration, then Latino and Bosnian newcomers in the 1990s all started here first. The post-war ranches and modest bungalows were cheap. The factories were close.
The Burmese Arrive
The story of Burmese Fort Wayne starts with one man and one couple. Neil Sowards grew up the son of an American Baptist missionary in Burma. After Burma’s military crushed the 8888 pro-democracy uprising in 1988, Neil and his wife Diana began pulling former student activists out of the country through Catholic Charities of Fort Wayne-South Bend. The first arrivals came in 1991, a handful of singles and small families, many of them Mon and Burman intellectuals from the failed uprising.
Aung Chan, an ethnic Mon, was among that first group to arrive from the Thai border in 1991. There was no community to land into. There was Catholic Charities, the Sowards’ living room, and the offer of an entry-level shift at a Fort Wayne factory.
For more than a decade the community grew slowly, family by family. Then the floodgates opened.
Fort Wayne at Its Peak
In 2005 the United States agreed to a mass resettlement of Burmese refugees stuck in the Thai border camps, in particular Mae La, the largest camp on the Burma-Thailand border. Refugees who had been there since the 1990s, most of them Karen and Karenni, suddenly had a path out.
Then, beginning around 2007, came the Chin. An ethnic group from the rugged western highlands of Burma, almost entirely Christian, who had been hounded by the military regime. They fled by the tens of thousands first into Mizoram in India and into Malaysia, and from there into the UNHCR resettlement queue.
Fort Wayne took them in unprecedented numbers. In 2008 alone, Catholic Charities resettled more than 830 Burmese refugees in the city. The peak years of 2007 and 2008 brought over 1,400 new arrivals to northeast Indiana. The reason Fort Wayne was chosen, and the reason it kept being chosen, was a simple stack of conditions: cheap housing on the southeast side, landlords willing to rent to families with no credit history, manufacturing and meatpacking jobs that did not require strong English, an existing refugee resettlement office, and the gravitational pull of relatives already there.
Chain migration did the rest. One Chin family from Hakha sponsored cousins from the same village. The cousins sponsored siblings. A pastor in Fort Wayne told his old congregation in Falam where the work was. By 2016, Catholic Charities was counting around 6,000 Burmese-born residents in Fort Wayne. By 2022 the Burmese American Community Institute estimated 10,000 in the city proper, and other counts that include US-born children and secondary migrants put the figure closer to 20,000.
The community quickly stratified into ethnic sub-neighbourhoods, though all within a few miles of each other. Chin families clustered around the Baptist churches on Calhoun and Anthony. Karen families settled near First Baptist downtown, where Living Streams Karen Baptist Church met until 2019. Mon and Burman Buddhists built temples along Decatur Road. Rohingya Muslims, who began arriving in 2013, formed what is now the largest Rohingya community in the United States, a couple of streets over.
The Change
On 1 February 2021, the Burmese military staged another coup, deposing Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government. Within forty-eight hours, around 300 people from Fort Wayne’s Burmese community were on the lawn of the Allen County Courthouse with NLD flags and homemade signs. Many in the crowd were the same 88 Generation activists Neil Sowards had pulled out of Burma thirty years earlier, now grey-haired, holding the hands of their American-born grandchildren.
The coup brought a new wave of urgency to Fort Wayne. Family reunification petitions surged. New asylum cases piled up. A second-generation Burmese Fort Wayne, meanwhile, had already started filling the local schools, then the local hospitals, then the police force. Officers Lian Cung Bik and Mang Sonna joined the Fort Wayne Police Department specifically to bridge a community that did not always trust uniforms. Young Burmese-Americans went to Indiana University and Ivy Tech and Purdue Fort Wayne and came home as nurses, teachers and small-business owners.
The Landmarks of Burmese Fort Wayne
Burmese Christian Fellowship, 2323 Fairfield Avenue. An American Baptist Churches USA congregation that meets in the sanctuary of First Baptist Church of Fort Wayne every Sunday at 11:45 a.m. For many Chin families, this was the first Burmese-language worship service they ever attended in the United States. It still anchors the Christian end of the community.
Vihara Mon Buddhist Temple, 3725 McCormick Avenue. The spiritual home of Fort Wayne’s Mon Buddhist community, led by Abbot Sundima. Services are held in the Mon language, a reminder that “Burmese” was never a single tongue. A second Mon temple on Decatur Road serves the overflow.
Jetavan Vihara, 6615 South Hanna Street. A Burmese-language Theravada temple where Thingyan water festival is celebrated each April. The temple yard turns into a controlled flood for three days, monks chanting in one corner and children with plastic buckets in the other.
Asian Market, 2615 South Calhoun Street. One of the first Burmese groceries in the city and still one of the busiest. Fish paste, dried lemongrass, betel leaves, fermented tea, all the ingredients for mohinga and laphet thoke that you cannot find in a Kroger.
Little Burma, 3230 South Calhoun Street. Half grocery, half cafe, the kind of place where you order mohinga at the counter and the cook is also the owner and also a deacon at one of the Chin churches.
Burmese Asian Market, 7520 South Anthony Boulevard. Out on the far southeast edge of the community, this is where families do their big weekend shop. The aisles read in Burmese, Chin, Karen, Mon and English.
Allen County Courthouse Green, downtown. Not a Burmese landmark by founding, but by adoption. Every protest against the Burmese military regime, every vigil after a cyclone or a coup, every rally for the National League for Democracy has happened on these steps. In February 2021 it was the first place Burmese Fort Wayne went after the coup.
Where the Fort Wayne Burmese Came From
Most came from Chin State in the far west of Burma, a mountainous Christian-majority region bordering India’s Mizoram. The Chin townships of Hakha, Falam, Tedim and Tonzang are over-represented in Fort Wayne to a striking degree. Many Chin families fled first across the border into Mizoram or Manipur, others to Kuala Lumpur, before being processed for US resettlement through UNHCR. Hakha and Falam are now spoken in Fort Wayne grocery aisles as routinely as English.
A second strand came from the long Thai border. Karen and Karenni refugees, mostly Christian and Buddhist respectively, had been stuck for a generation in the Mae La, Umpiem Mai and Tham Hin camps, and arrived in Fort Wayne from 2005 onwards. A smaller Burman Buddhist contingent came from the Irrawaddy heartland and a Mon community from southern Burma’s Mon State. The Rohingya, Sunni Muslims from Rakhine State, came later through Bangladesh and Malaysia, beginning in 2013.
The thread that ties almost all of them together is the Burmese military regime: 1962, 1988, 2007, 2021. Each fresh wave of repression has sent another group westward, and a striking share of the westward journeys end on Fort Wayne’s southeast side.
Fort Wayne Today
Drive south on Anthony Boulevard on a Saturday afternoon in 2026 and the Burmese imprint is unmistakable. There is a Chin Baptist church plant, then a Mon Buddhist temple, then a Karen wedding spilling out of a community hall, then three Burmese groceries in a single strip mall. Restaurants like Mahnin on South Calhoun and Nawarat on South Anthony Boulevard serve mohinga and laphet thoke alongside the standard pad thai that pays the bills.
The community is no longer a refugee community in any meaningful sense. A second generation, born in Fort Wayne or arrived as small children, are nurses at Parkview and Lutheran hospitals, mechanics at General Motors Fort Wayne Assembly, soldiers at the Indiana National Guard, and small-business owners across the southeast side. The first US Senate candidate of Chin descent, the first Burmese-American mayor, the first Falam-speaking pediatrician: these are all firsts that are now being quietly racked up in Indiana, not California or New York.
The 2021 coup, and the immigration crackdowns that have followed each US administration since, have kept Fort Wayne’s Burmese on edge. But the institutions are now too deep to pull up: more than a dozen Burmese churches, four Buddhist temples, a network of mosques, two cultural centres, and a school system that teaches more Chin first-language speakers than perhaps any school district in the country. The 88 Generation came as exiles. Their grandchildren are something else: Hoosier Burmese, mid-Western and Chin and Karen and Mon, depending on which Sunday and which kitchen.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Burmese refugees settle in Fort Wayne?
Burmese refugees first came to Fort Wayne in 1991 through Catholic Charities, sponsored by Neil and Diana Sowards, a couple with deep ties to American Baptist missionary work in Burma. Fort Wayne offered cheap housing on its southeast side, manufacturing jobs that did not require strong English, and a resettlement infrastructure that had already absorbed earlier waves of refugees. Chain migration did the rest, with each new family pulling cousins, in-laws and former neighbours from Chin State and the Thai border camps to the same few streets.
Is Fort Wayne still home to a large Burmese community?
Yes. Fort Wayne remains the largest Burmese community in the United States, with estimates ranging from 10,000 Burmese residents in the city proper to roughly 20,000 when US-born children and secondary migrants are counted. The community is still concentrated in the southeast side zip codes of 46806, 46807 and 46816, and is anchored by more than a dozen churches, four Buddhist temples, several mosques and a thick network of Burmese groceries and restaurants.
What are the most famous Burmese landmarks in Fort Wayne?
The best-known landmarks in Burmese Fort Wayne include Burmese Christian Fellowship at First Baptist Church on Fairfield Avenue, Vihara Mon Buddhist Temple on McCormick Avenue, Jetavan Vihara on South Hanna Street, and the Asian Market and Little Burma groceries on South Calhoun Street. The Allen County Courthouse Green downtown has become the unofficial site for every major Burmese protest and vigil, including the 2021 anti-coup demonstrations.
Where in Burma did the Fort Wayne Burmese come from?
Most Fort Wayne Burmese are ethnic Chin from the Christian-majority highlands of Chin State in western Myanmar, particularly the townships of Hakha, Falam, Tedim and Tonzang. Significant numbers are Karen and Karenni from the Thai border region who arrived via the Mae La, Umpiem Mai and Tham Hin refugee camps, along with smaller Mon, Kachin, Burman Buddhist and Rohingya Muslim populations from across the rest of the country.
When did Burmese refugees first arrive in Fort Wayne?
The first Burmese refugees arrived in Fort Wayne in 1991, sponsored by Catholic Charities of Fort Wayne-South Bend and by Neil and Diana Sowards. The community grew slowly for more than a decade before the major waves of 2007 and 2008, when over 1,400 Burmese refugees, mostly Chin and Karen, were resettled to northeast Indiana from the Thai border camps. A renewed wave followed the February 2021 military coup in Myanmar.
If your family’s story passed through Fort Wayne, or any of the places Burmese refugees and their children made home, Atlas of Home can help you trace it. From the highlands of Chin State to the camps along the Thai border, to the southeast side of Fort Wayne, to wherever you are reading this from now.