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1947–1950
Lead: The fullest surviving picture of the mid-century zoo is the animal report of 1947, carried in the zoo's earlier published history, and it is printed here at the size the zoo published it — the whole list, because the list itself is the portrait of what a small industrial city's zoo was in the first years after the Second World War: 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 published list prints it], 1 African wild ass, 2 oxen, 4 domestic goats, 8 raccoons, 2 peacocks, and 4 rhesus monkeys. Bears and big cats and hoofstock, one polar bear in northern Indiana, and eight raccoons — a collection of just under a hundred animals, heavy on the hardy species a city parks department could keep through an Indiana winter.
The building record of the same years, from the same published timeline, is modest and exact: in 1949 a farm barn was built, twenty-five feet wide by twenty feet long, two stories, for the domesticated animals — a building that still operates at the zoo as its farm barn and petting zoo — and in 1950 approval was given for a small bird and animal shelter at a cost of about five hundred dollars. Two oxen in the 1947 list carry their own small story in the timeline: a pair of male oxen had been purchased from the Chicago stockyards in 1937 and put to work clearing trees in the park, draft animals earning their keep in the zoo that kept them. This was the zoo the Society generation inherited: ten acres, a WPA cat house, a new farm barn, and a hundred animals behind the park's fences.
Sources:
- Potawatomi Zoo, earlier published history timeline (the 1947 animal report in full; the oxen of 1937; the farm barn of 1949; the bird and animal shelter approval of 1950).