Deer Forest: the petting zoo that 3.5 million people remember

For a kid growing up anywhere near Coloma in the second half of the twentieth century, a day at Deer Forest was the whole summer in one trip. It opened in 1949, and the idea was simple and irresistible: you bought a paper cone of feed and the deer came right up and ate out of your hand. So did the llamas, the antelope, the mountain sheep, and a yard full of peacocks dragging their tails through the dust.

That was the heart of it, but there was more. A little train chugged a loop through the property. Storybook Lane lined the path with the nursery rhymes — Humpty Dumpty on his wall, the old woman’s giant shoe — built big enough to climb on. By 1989 the place had counted more than three and a half million visitors through its gates, which is a staggering number for a roadside animal park in a town this small.

It ran for over sixty years, which is a long life for an attraction like this, and like a lot of them it ran on thin margins the whole way. Owners changed, money got tight, and the gates closed for good in 2014. For a while the abandoned Storybook figures sat out in the weather, slowly fading, and they became a minor pilgrimage for people who’d grown up there.

Now the North Berrien Historical Museum keeps the memory tended, with exhibits of saved pieces — including the little brass “elephant keys” the park once sold as souvenirs, the kind you’d slot into a talking storybook box. Ask anyone in the area over a certain age about Deer Forest and watch their face change. Some places sell tickets; a few sell a childhood, and for sixty-five years this one in Coloma did exactly that.