"Indiana's Oldest Zoo": The Claim Examined

The claim and its rival, as each institution publishes them

Lead: The Potawatomi Zoo has long called itself the oldest zoo in Indiana, and the claim deserves the same treatment as every other statement in this history: printed at its sources, with its mechanism showing. The zoo's claim rests on its two foundings. Its director stated it to a county board in January 2020 in the 1902 form — "the zoo started in 1902 as a duck pond in Leeper Park and is the oldest zoo in Indiana" — and the city's Parks Department used the same form in 2011: "first established in 1902 and Indiana's oldest zoo." The zoo's current website hedges the superlative to "one of the oldest zoos in Indiana," while its institutional history still begins in 1902. The claim has a rival. Evansville's Mesker Park Zoo opened in 1928, and its own operator's published materials call it "Indiana's first zoo" and the oldest in the state — a claim that cannot stand if either of South Bend's dates does, since a zoo keeping animals from 1902, or formally founded in 1921, predates 1928 on any reading.

The honest difficulty inside South Bend's own claim is different, and the zoo itself has named it: asked about the title on its own Facebook page in January 2026, the zoo answered that it is "technically the second oldest zoo in Indiana because an earlier South Bend zoo existed and later closed" — the Leeper Park zoo, counted as a separate and earlier institution, makes the Potawatomi Zoo of 1921 the second zoo in the city's own line, while counting Leeper Park as this zoo's beginning makes it the first and oldest. Both mechanisms are in the record, and the zoo's own publications have used both. What the documents settle is narrower and stronger than the slogan: South Bend has kept zoo animals on public ground since 1902, the Potawatomi Zoo has stood in Potawatomi Park since 1921, and no other zoo in Indiana documents an older line than either date. The slogan is printed here as the claim it is; the dates underneath it are the history.

Sources:

1. Minutes, St. Joseph County Board of Managers for Hotel-Motel Tax, 22 January 2020 (Sisk: "started in 1902 as a duck pond in Leeper Park and is the oldest zoo in Indiana").
2. City of South Bend news release, 13 December 2011 (the zoo "first established in 1902 and Indiana's oldest zoo").
3. Potawatomi Zoo, current website (the zoo as "one of the oldest zoos in Indiana"); the zoo's own Facebook answer, January 2026 ("technically the second oldest").
4. Mesker Park Zoo & Botanic Garden, operator's published materials (opened 1928; "Indiana's first zoo").