Erskine's Deer: The Potawatomi Park Founding, 1921

21 May 1921, Board of Park Commissioners minutes

Lead: The Potawatomi Zoo's founding, as the zoo itself tells it, rests on a document: the minutes of the South Bend Board of Park Commissioners, Book 1, 21 May 1921. In the zoo's centennial account, drawn from Rick Riddle's research in the parks record, the Board of Park Commissioners in 1921 accepted an offer from Albert Russell Erskine — the president of the Studebaker Corporation, South Bend's wagon-and-automobile giant, whose own history fills its own section of this history — of a single deer as the foundation for a zoo at Potawatomi Park. One deer, given by the city's leading industrialist to its park board, is the whole of the founding act; everything since stands on it. The zoo marked the centennial of that founding through the summer of 2021, with "Third Thursdays" evening openings on 17 June, 15 July, and 19 August, celebrating, in its words, one hundred years of the zoo in the River Park area — a phrasing that itself holds the two foundings apart, since the zoo's own current published history says plainly: "South Bend's first zoo, the South Bend Zoo, began as a modest duck pond in Leeper Park in 1902.

In 1921, the Potawatomi Zoo was established in Potawatomi Park, where it continues to exist today." One more date stands in the city's own chronology and is printed here rather than smoothed away: the Parks Department's chronological history carries the line "1920 — Potawatomi Park used as a zoo," a year before the Erskine minutes. Animals were certainly in the park before May 1921 — the deer herd of 1912 and the buffalo of 1917, told in the next entry — and the chronology's 1920 line and the park board's 1921 minutes read together as the difference between a park where animals were kept and a zoo formally founded. Both are in the record; both are printed.

Sources:

1. Minutes of the South Bend Board of Park Commissioners, Book 1, 21 May 1921 (Erskine's deer), as cited in the zoo's published history.
2. Potawatomi Zoo, centennial release "Zoo Turns 100," 7 June 2021 (the Erskine offer and the Board's acceptance; Rick Riddle's research; the 2021 Third Thursdays).
3. Potawatomi Zoo, current published history (potawatomizoo.org: Leeper Park 1902; Potawatomi Zoo established 1921).
4. South Bend Parks & Recreation Department, chronological history ("1920 Potawatomi Park used as a zoo").