Leeper Park: The City's First Zoo, 1902

1902 – closed 1912/1914, as the record splits

Lead: South Bend's first zoo began, in the zoo's own published words, as "a modest duck pond in Leeper Park in the spring of 1902." It was called the South Bend Zoo. Leeper Park, on the river west of downtown, was the city's second park — the Parks Department's chronology dates its establishment to 1902, the same year the animals came. A duck pond is a small beginning, but the zoo's own history and the city's own publications have always treated 1902 as the start of zoo-keeping in South Bend: when the Parks Department marked the park system's history in a city news release of 13 December 2011, it described the Potawatomi Zoo as "first established in 1902 and Indiana's oldest zoo," carrying the Leeper Park beginning straight into the modern zoo's pedigree. How the Leeper Park zoo ended, the record gives twice, and both endings are printed. The zoo's earlier published history timeline records that in 1912 a herd of deer was moved from Leeper Park to Potawatomi Park — the collection, or its heart, transferred east across the city. Rick Riddle, a retired Parks and Recreation employee whose research the zoo itself published at its 2021 centennial, gives the end differently: the Leeper Park Zoo closed in 1914. A two-year seam stands between the deer herd's move and the first zoo's closing, and no source reached for this history settles which year the last animal left Leeper Park. What is settled is the shape of the thing: South Bend kept a zoo at Leeper Park from 1902, its deer were in Potawatomi Park by the early 1910s, and the Leeper Park zoo was gone by the middle of that decade — seven years before the Potawatomi Park founding of 1921 that the next entry tells.

Sources:

1. Potawatomi Zoo, published history (the duck pond in Leeper Park, spring 1902; the deer herd moved to Potawatomi Park, 1912), the zoo's earlier published timeline.
2. Potawatomi Zoo, centennial release "Zoo Turns 100," 7 June 2021 (Rick Riddle's parks research: the Leeper Park Zoo closed in 1914).
3. City of South Bend news release, 13 December 2011 (Parks Department: the zoo "first established in 1902 and Indiana's oldest zoo").
4. South Bend Parks & Recreation Department, chronological history (Leeper Park established 1902, the city's second park).