The ground and the three foundings — Potawatomi Park, Leeper Park 1902, Potawatomi 1921

ROWS #614–#617 · BOUNDARY-PRINTED · SOUTH BEND'S WHOLE

The zoo Osceola uses stands at 500 South Greenlawn Avenue, South Bend, in Potawatomi Park, between the St. Joseph River and the Grand Trunk railroad. The Parks Department's chronology dates the park to 1905; on 3 April 1906 the county Agricultural Society's forty fairgrounds acres became the city's park — both dates stand, as South Bend's file prints them, and the 1906 date is the one this build's own Fairs leg already carried. The zoo occupies twenty-three of those acres. Its name is the park's, and the park's is the Potawatomi people's, whose valley this was — a name Osceola's own Tribes leg knows from the other side of the county line.

The mechanisms split three ways, and stay split. (i) Menagerie origin, 1902: the South Bend Zoo began, in the zoo's own words, as “a modest duck pond in Leeper Park in the spring of 1902.” Its end prints two ways — a deer herd moved from Leeper Park to Potawatomi Park in 1912 (the zoo's earlier timeline); the Leeper Park Zoo closed in 1914 (Rick Riddle's parks research, published by the zoo at its centennial) — and no source reached settles the seam. Animals reached the Potawatomi ground before its founding: that deer herd in 1912, kept from a Wall Street house once used for tuberculosis patients, and buffalo on a quarter acre in 1917; the city chronology even carries “1920 — Potawatomi Park used as a zoo.” (ii) First animal and (iii) zoo-as-zoo, 1921: on 21 May 1921 the Board of Park Commissioners accepted Albert Russell Erskine's offer — the Studebaker president's single deer, given as the foundation for a zoo at Potawatomi Park — and, in the zoo's current words, “In 1921, the Potawatomi Zoo was established in Potawatomi Park, where it continues to exist today.” The zoo marked that centennial in summer 2021, and expanded to ten acres in 1927. A menagerie of 1902, animals accumulating from 1912, and a zoo founded in 1921 are three mechanisms; no single founding year in this section merges them.

Sources:

1. South Bend zoo file (Zoo, Brain copy read November 2026), articles “The Ground,” “Leeper Park,” “Erskine's Deer,” “First Growth” — Board of Park Commissioners minutes, Book 1, 21 May 1921; the zoo's published history and centennial release, 7 June 2021; Parks Department chronology.
2. Fairs leg of this build, for the 1906 park course as Osceola already held it.