The City's Other Zoo: Storyland at Rum Village

1957–1981 — a boundary entry

Lead: The Potawatomi Zoo was not the only zoo South Bend ever ran, and this entry stands in the zoo's history precisely so that the Potawatomi record is not mistaken for the whole of it. Rum Village Park, on the city's south side — acquired in 1916 for forty-five thousand dollars — opened Storyland Zoo in 1957, a children's zoo of farm animals and nursery-rhyme exhibits, with a children's train that began the same year and wound through the park. Storyland ran for twenty-four years and closed in 1981, the same year, by coincidence, that the Potawatomi Zoo began charging admission. Its ground is wooded park today; the Rum Village Nature Center, opened in 1974, still operates in the park. Storyland belongs to Rum Village's own history, and to the city's, rather than to the Potawatomi Zoo's institutional line — it had its own site, its own years, and its own closing — but two generations of South Bend children met their first animals there, and a history of the city's zoos that omitted it would be telling less than the record holds. It is printed at this size, as a boundary, and not carried into the Potawatomi entries around it.

Sources:

1. South Bend Parks & Recreation Department, chronological history (Rum Village Park acquired 1916; Storyland Zoo opened 1957 and closed 1981; the children's train, 1957; the Nature Center, 1974).
2. Rum Village Park master plan and Rum Village Neighborhood Association history (Storyland Zoo, 1957–1981).