Kept animals: the stockyard and the zoo

1877 — the present

The stockyard: The domestic animal record of Fort Wayne is a packing-house record. The Fred Eckart Packing Company — founded in 1877 in the county record; its great West Main Street plant opened in 1887 in the News-Sentinel's Cityscapes history, both dates carried as their sources give them — ran a slaughterhouse at 1825 West Main whose rear stockyard could hold 2,000 animals. In one three-month period the plant slaughtered more than 500 cattle and 10,000 hogs, the animals arriving by rail from Chicago, and it could store 5,000 smoked hogs and 15,000 pickled pigs at a time. The stockyard burned in 1949. Peter Eckrich opened his Fort Wayne meat market in 1894 and incorporated Peter Eckrich & Sons in 1925; the firms' full records are in the Business leg — what belongs here is the scale: for a century, the largest single gathering of animals in Fort Wayne was the herd waiting at West Main Street.

The zoo: The kept-animal record's other pole is the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo — renamed the Fort Wayne Zoo on 1 January 2025 — which opened on 3 July 1965 on five and a half acres in Franke Park with 18 exhibits, from a 54-acre nature preserve added to the park in 1952. Its animal record holds two genuine national marks. Over the years the zoo was home to twelve Tasmanian devils, the most of any zoo in the United States; the last of them, Coolah, died on 18 May 2004, at seven and a half — at his death the last Tasmanian devil living outside Australia. And on 22 November 2014 the Sumatran orangutan Tara, who had arrived from Columbus in 2013, gave birth to Asmara, sired by Tengku, the male who arrived from Zoo Atlanta in 1995 — a critically endangered species breeding in Franke Park. The zoo's lion Bill, among its most famous residents, was euthanized on 6 April 2016 for an aggressive cancer. The zoo today keeps some 1,000 animals of about 200 species on 40 acres.

Sources:

1. News-Sentinel, Cityscapes, "Mother of Fort Wayne's meat packers," 5 December 1982 (the Eckart plant, stockyard capacity, and slaughter figures), via the Society's Peter Eckrich page, acgsi.org; Allen County Genealogical Society, E Named Places (the 1877 company founding).
2. Fort Wayne Children's Zoo record as compiled in the zoo's history (the 1952 preserve; the 3 July 1965 opening; Coolah, 18 May 2004; the twelve devils; Asmara, 22 November 2014; Bill, 6 April 2016; the 2025 renaming), via the zoo's published history and contemporaneous announcements.