Researching Harrisburg’s Wildwood Zoological Park

As a current student in a Digital History class at Messiah University, I was tasked with creating a Story Map about an aspect of the history of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. For my Digital History Story Map, I chose the topic of the Wildwood Zoological Park that used to exist in the capital city. While the Zoological Park is rarely mentioned or featured in historical accounts of Harrisburg today, it is an important aspect of Harrisburg’s history during the Great Depression and World War II, as it served as a local place of recreation and was also home to many animals who have sadly now been largely forgotten.

To research this topic and complete this Story Map, I visited two local historical archives; the Pennsylvania State Archives, and the Dauphin County Archives. Prior to my visits to each archive, I utilized the archives’ websites to request physical materials relating to Parks and Recreations in Harrisburg, as well as any materials mentioning zoo animals. While at the archives, I analyzed various physical materials that mainly consisted of black and white images of the land on which Wildwood Park is located. However, I was unfortunately unable to find much material relating to the Zoological Park itself, which made my research process much more difficult than I had originally anticipated. Despite the challenges that I faced, I felt that it was important to tell the story of Wildwood Zoological Park. Wildwood Zoological Park is an element of Harrisburg’s history that deserves to be remembered for its value as a recreational space and temporary home for so many long-forgotten animals.

From the few sources that I was able to collect, I was able to gather a few general thoughts about the Wildwood Zoological Park’s history. The Wildwood Zoological Park was built on Wetzel’s Swamp, a marshy area near Wildwood Lake that was improved for the creation of the park. Before the Zoological Park, Wildwood was simply an outdoor recreational space where many groups held picnics, children’s camps, or other outdoor group events. In the early 1910s, zoos became very popular in America, and in 1927, Harrisburg residents received their own when Wildwood Park added the Wildwood Zoological Park. Unfortunately, the zoo closed due to financial struggles in 1945. It is thought that these financial struggles came about as a result of both the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the meat rationing that took place during World War II. With meat being rationed in the US, Wildwood likely struggled to feed their carnivorous animals, such as lions, wolves, and bears. Despite their struggles, the Zoological Park seemed to be fairly popular with those who lived in Harrisburg during its heyday, with events at the zoo frequently mentioned in local newspapers. Although there were supposedly a number of animal species who lived at the Wildwood Zoo, I was unable to find images of any of these animals, with the only historic images of the zoo that I uncovered being that of the zoo’s entrance gate, and another of the bear caves after they had been abandoned.

Due to the lack of information available about Wildwood Zoological Park, I struggled to carry out much of my research. I began my research at the Pennsylvania State Archives, where I was hoping to find early physical documentation of the Zoological Park that I could use as a primary source. Unfortunately, I was not able to find much in the way of extensive primary sources that related to my topic or were useful in my research. In addition to the difficulties I had finding any sort of mention of Wildwood Zoological Park, some of the folders that I requested from the archives were empty when I looked inside them. What I was able to find, however, was a vast collection of black and white images of the land that later became Wildwood Park and the area where the Zoological Park itself would be located. Unfortunately, this area later became a trash dump. I also found a number of images of this dump and the fire that would later occur there. While I enjoyed my time researching at both locations, I found the Dauphin County Historical Archives to be more helpful, as well as having a greater number of artifacts and sources pertaining to my topic. While researching, I was able to integrate much of what I learned through my Digital History class at Messiah University. While collecting documents and sources to use in my research, I began by scanning everything that I found in the physical archives, so that I would have a digital copy to both take home with me for further research or inspection, and to use in future projects regarding Wildwood, such as this Story Map. For most of the documents and images that I found, I scanned them using the Adobe Acrobat app on my iPhone. I used tripods to position my iPhone in a proper way over each artifact, and then used the app to scan. For other documents, my phone was not able to capture them in high quality, so I used a CZUR scanner to scan them instead.

After scanning my documents and re-examining them at home, I found that the quality of my content collected was overall a bit of a mixed bag. While most of my images scanned in a very high quality format, I had a few images that came back much more blurry or pixelated than I would have preferred. Fortunately, I was able to edit most of my images to make them clearer.

I still consider preserving evidence of the Wildwood Zoological Park to be very historically important, as this is an aspect of Harrisburg’s history that is not very well documented, and is not often discussed. I am a firm believer in every story in history being important and worthy of telling, and I believe that by preserving evidence of Harrisburg’s Wildwood Zoological Park, I am preserving the history of Harrisburg.

My final project is available here: The Missing Zoo: The History of Harrisburg’s Wildwood Park and the Wildwood Zoological Park

Above: An image of a Junior Founder’s Certificate presented to Dorothy Hoy on May 17, 1929, for being a donor to the Harrisburg Zoo.

Kylie Smith is a third-year student at Messiah University. She is a Public History major who loves researching animals and the interactions they have with human history. Her interest in animals inspired her to write about the Wildwood Zoological Park.

Image Sources:

‌Dauphin County Archives. n.d. Entrance Zoological GardensPhotograph. Folder. Accessed October 2024.

Zoological Society of Harrisburg. 1929. Junior Founder’s Certificate.