First Growth: Deer, a Buffalo Yard, and Ten Acres

1912–1927

Lead: The zoo's earlier published timeline — the fullest early chronology the zoo has put out — records the young collection's growth in plain steps. A herd of deer was moved to Potawatomi Park in 1912, and the zoo was based out of a house on Wall Street formerly used by the Anti-Tuberculosis League to house tuberculosis patients: the zoo's first headquarters was a recycled contagion house at the park's edge. In 1917, buffalo were placed on a quarter acre in Potawatomi Park — American bison, the emblematic animal of the plains the Potawatomi had hunted, kept on a small fenced yard of the park that bore the tribe's name. In 1927 the zoo was expanded to ten acres. The reader will notice that the first two of these dates fall before the 1921 founding told in the previous entry; that is the record as the zoo published it, and it is printed unsmoothed. The likeliest reading of the zoo's own documents is that animals accumulated in Potawatomi Park through the 1910s — deer in 1912, buffalo in 1917 — and that the park board's acceptance of Erskine's deer in May 1921 made the keeping official and gave the Potawatomi Zoo its founding act. But no source reached for this history says that in so many words, and the seam is left visible: a zoo used in the park by 1920, on the city's chronology, with a documented animal presence reaching back to 1912, and a formal founding in 1921. The 1927 expansion to ten acres is the last fixed point of the zoo's first era; when the Parks Department's chronology records the zoo's first major renovation in 1979, it measures the interval as fifty-two years — reaching back, by its own arithmetic, to 1927.

Sources:

1. Potawatomi Zoo, earlier published history timeline (deer herd 1912; the Wall Street house; buffalo on a quarter acre, 1917; expansion to ten acres, 1927).
2. South Bend Parks & Recreation Department, chronological history (the 1979 renovation as the first in 52 years).