“Indiana's oldest zoo,” tested — and the name course, with the 2025 date corrected

ROWS #625–#626 · LEG 92 ITEMS 13–14 · BOUNDARY-PRINTED

Osceola has no oldest-zoo claim — no zoo, no claim. The boundary claim is examined, not repeated: Potawatomi's director stated it in the 1902 form in January 2020 (“started in 1902 as a duck pond in Leeper Park and is the oldest zoo in Indiana”), and the Parks Department used the same form in 2011; the zoo's current website hedges it to “one of the oldest zoos in Indiana.” Evansville's Mesker Park Zoo (opened 1928) publishes a rival “Indiana's first zoo,” which cannot stand if either South Bend date does. And the zoo itself, on its own Facebook page in January 2026, corrected the slogan from inside: it is “technically the second oldest zoo in Indiana because an earlier South Bend zoo existed and later closed” — Leeper counted as a separate first zoo makes Potawatomi (1921) the second; Leeper counted as this zoo's beginning makes it the oldest. Both mechanisms stand in the zoo's own publications. What the documents settle is narrower and stronger: South Bend has kept zoo animals on public ground since 1902, Potawatomi has stood in its park since 1921, and no Indiana zoo documents an older line than either date.

The name course prints whole, with its 2025 item corrected. The collection's names: the South Bend Zoo, at Leeper Park, from 1902; then the Potawatomi Zoo, from the 1921 establishment, taking its park's name — the name it carries still, verified in the zoo's Fall 2025 magazine and November 2026 listings, with no renaming in between in any record reached. The society's course runs beside it: Friends of the Zoo (1971), formally the St. Joseph Zoological Society, now the Potawatomi Zoological Society, Inc. The register's “current name effective 1 January 2025” pattern is not this zoo's: 1 January 2025 is when the Fort Wayne Children's Zoo became the Fort Wayne Zoo, announced 10 December 2024 by that zoo itself — Fort Wayne's whole, tested here only to keep the date off Potawatomi's course. Attaching it would invent a renaming that never happened.

Sources:

1. South Bend zoo file, articles “‘Indiana's Oldest Zoo’: The Claim Examined,” “Leeper Park,” “Erskine's Deer,” “The Zoological Society, 1971” — tax-board minutes, 22 January 2020; City release, 13 December 2011; the zoo's website and January 2026 Facebook answer; Mesker Park Zoo materials.
2. Fort Wayne Zoo announcement, 10 December 2024 — “Effective January 1, 2025, the zoo will be known as the Fort Wayne Zoo”; cited solely for the correction.