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ROW #618 · LEG 92 ITEM 6 · BOUNDARY-PRINTED
The pre-modern zoo was a small, hardy collection in one relief-built house: the Works Progress Administration built the Cat House, the zoo's first permanent structure — dated 1936 in the zoo's own timeline (“known as the WPA building,” still holding leopards) and 1940 in the account resting on the park commissioners' annual report; both dates print, unaveraged. The animal report of 1947 prints at the size the zoo published it: 4 black bears, 1 polar bear, 2 African lions, 5 bison, 3 fallow deer, 7 sika deer, 9 elk, 4 guanacos, 3 dwarf zebu, 8 Barbary sheep, 3 caracal sheep as the list prints it, 1 African wild ass, 2 oxen, 4 domestic goats, 8 raccoons, 2 peacocks, 4 rhesus monkeys — just under a hundred animals. A farm barn followed in 1949 (25 by 20 feet, two stories; still the farm barn and petting zoo) and a bird shelter was approved in 1950 at about 500 dollars. South Bend also ran a second, children's zoo — Storyland at Rum Village, 1957–1981 — Rum Village's whole, not Potawatomi's line, printed in this one sentence so the boundary is not mistaken for the whole.
Sources:
- South Bend zoo file, articles “The WPA Cat House,” “The 1947 Inventory and the Postwar Barns,” “Storyland at Rum Village.”