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Zoo Farm 1988; butterflies 2008; carousel 2016; Zoo Luminate 2025
Lead: Around the headline animals stands the apparatus of an ordinary zoo day, and the record dates its pieces. The city's published profile of the zoo dates the Zoo Farm — the petting-zoo farm in the line of the 1949 farm barn — to 1988, and the seasonal butterfly exhibit, "Butterflies in Living Color," to a first opening in 2008. The Endangered Species Carousel opened in April 2016, as a magazine account of the zoo recorded that year. The Potawatomi Zoo Express Train ran about twenty-five years in gas-powered form before the zoo replaced it for the 2026 season with an electric CP Huntington replica, as the Tribune's season preview reported — which dates the gas train's arrival to about 2000. The zoo's calendar carries two winter light seasons: Gift of Lights, the holiday event running in 2021 from 26 November to 19 December, the nights on which the giraffes were first shown; and Zoo Luminate, a lantern production by Tianyu Arts & Culture that debuted in 2025 as the first of three billed years and, by the zoo director's own figure given to the Tribune, brought more than 80,000 additional visitors apart from the daytime crowds. Zoo Luminate returned from 22 April to 28 June 2026 under the theme "Sea to Believe." Zoo Boo, the Halloween trick-or-treating tradition the zoo was already calling long-standing in 2019, continues each October. None of these fixtures is the zoo's history in the large; together they are the texture of its years — the farm, the carousel, the train, and the lights are what most visits, and most childhood memories of the place, are actually made of.
Sources:
- City-data profile of the Potawatomi Zoo (Zoo Farm in operation since 1988; the butterfly exhibit first opened 2008).
- "One Tank Trips," The Columbian, August–September 2017 (the Endangered Species Carousel opened April 2016).
- South Bend Tribune, season preview, 26 March 2026 (the electric CP Huntington train replacing the 25-year-old gas train; Big Cat Tracks).
- Potawatomi Zoo releases (Gift of Lights, 26 November – 19 December 2021; Zoo Boo, 2019–2026); South Bend Tribune (Zoo Luminate's 80,000 additional visitors, per Sisk); Zoo Luminate 2026 dates and theme.