South Bend Zoo History

The Zoo

South Bend has kept animals on public ground for more than a hundred and twenty years, and for most of that time it has kept them in two places that this history has to hold apart before it can tell either one straight. The city's first zoo was a duck pond in Leeper Park in 1902, a modest menagerie that lived nineteen years and then closed. The zoo that stands today, the Potawatomi Zoo in Potawatomi Park, was established in 1921 on the gift of a single deer from the president of the Studebaker Corporation. The zoo itself carries both dates in its own published history, and so does this account: the 1902 beginning and the 1921 founding are printed below as the separate mechanisms they are, not blended into one founding year. Between them and the present stand a Works Progress Administration cat house that still holds leopards, a stolen ocelot who made Paul Harvey's national newscast, a second children's zoo at Rum Village that ran for twenty-four years and closed in 1981, a zoological society organized in 1971 that took the whole institution over from the city on New Year's Day 2014, an accreditation held continuously since 1987, and a ten-year master plan whose works — giraffes, lions, bears, a rhino, and a big-cat complex still under construction in the fall of 2026 — carried attendance past four hundred thousand in 2025, the largest crowd in the zoo's history. What follows is the institution whole, at the size the record gives it.