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MAY 1921 · THE SMALLEST FOUNDING GIFT IN THIS RECORD
The deer: The Potawatomi Zoo began with a single animal, given. In May 1921 the Board of Park Commissioners accepted the offer of Albert Russell Erskine, president of the Studebaker Corporation, of one deer as the foundation for a zoo at Potawatomi Park — the whole of the founding act, preserved in the park board's minutes. The Donations section of this history prints it as the smallest founding gift in its record, and the measure of the gift is what stands on it: a zoological society that took the institution over in 2014, an accreditation held since 1987, and in 2025 the largest crowd in the zoo's history, past four hundred thousand visitors — from one deer. The city's first zoo, a modest duck pond in Leeper Park in 1902, is a separate beginning, and the Zoo section keeps the two foundings apart, as the zoo's own published history does.
Sources:
- The Zoo section of this history — the May 1921 park-board acceptance of Erskine's single deer, the 1902 Leeper Park duck pond as the separate first founding, and the 2025 attendance past four hundred thousand; the Major Donations section — the deer as the record's smallest founding gift.