Fort Wayne Children's Zoo History

The Zoo

Fort Wayne has kept animals on public ground since 1952, when the city's new Bird and Wildlife Sanctuary in Franke Park opened with four monkeys, a black bear, three wildcats and an American eagle among its displays. Thirteen years later, on 3 July 1965, the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo opened on five and a half of those acres — a $500,000 children's zoo built by community giving, directed by Earl Wells, and run on a principle it has never dropped: no tax dollars for operations, everything earned at the gate or given. The institution that grew from those eighteen exhibits now covers forty acres, keeps about a thousand animals of some two hundred species, holds accreditation from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums that dates to the mid-1970s, and draws more guests than any other attraction in northeast Indiana. Its history is a sequence of builds, each paid for the same way: the African Veldt of 1976, the Australian Adventure of 1987 and its three-phase rebuild of 2014–16, the domed Indonesian Rain Forest of 1994, the $9 million African Journey of 2009, the Asian Trek of 2023, and the Coastal Cove of 2025. It is also, twice over, a record-holder's history: for seventeen years this was the zoo that kept more Tasmanian devils than any other in North America, and its Sumatran orangutans have now produced three Fort Wayne births, the third of them in January 2026. On 1 January 2025, after sixty seasons, the zoo dropped "Children's" from its name and became simply the Fort Wayne Zoo. What follows is the institution whole, at the size the record gives it.