Potter Park Zoo started with a couple of elk somebody gave the city

Michigan’s first public zoo began the way a lot of old zoos did — with a handful of donated animals nobody quite knew what to do with. Elk and deer, a bear, a couple of raccoons, and a few other native creatures were moved into Potter Park in Lansing in 1920, and that’s the year the zoo counts as its start. The park itself, a wooded bend of land along the Red Cedar River, had been dedicated five years earlier in 1915.

The animal collection grew, and so did the buildings. A bird and reptile house went up in 1929, and a lion house opened the year after. A Lansing resident named Sophie Turner gave 17 acres to the cause, pushing the park to its present 102 acres. Over a hundred years the place filled out into a full zoo, with more than 160 species now living along the river.

There’s a quirk in who owns it. The land belongs to the City of Lansing, but the zoo is run by Ingham County — a split arrangement that has kept the gates open through a century of city budgets. It’s the kind of deal that sounds awkward on paper and works fine in practice.

The river setting is still the best part. The Red Cedar curls along one edge, the Lansing River Trail runs right past, and the old shade trees mean the place feels less like a parking-lot zoo and more like a park that happens to have rhinos in it. On a summer morning you can walk in under those trees, hear the Red Cedar moving, and remember it all started with some elk the city took in because somebody asked nicely.