Twentieth Century Oddities

Over the last several weeks, I have been becoming more familiar with Seminole County’s history. This is especially true for the cities of Sanford and Casselberry. However, Seminole County history, like much of local history, often proves elusive and difficult to find on the internet. Attempting to learn about local history from “credible” sources can be even more difficult. This week I was trying to learn more about the Sanford Municipal Zoo, which existed where Sanford City Hall now is. (As you can probably imagine, every joke and pun imaginable has been made about this fact.)

In order to get a better understanding of the origin story of the zoo and understand the time frame in which it existed, I took a trip down to the Sanford Museum. While there, I got the chance to comb through some of their records on the zoo. Most of the records came from newspapers. Of course, the problem with newspapers is that they don’t have to cite their sources, and sometimes different articles share inconsistent information. So, I mostly focused on the pieces of information shared by multiple articles.

Reading about the history of the Sanford Zoo was truly an adventure, with many unexpected turns. And honestly, my biggest take away from it all is that Florida in the Mid-twentieth century was an odd place. You need only creativity and many willing volunteers. It also left me wondering how many laws actually existed, because there certainly weren't many, if any, about owning and moving exotic, and often dangerous animals.

To make a long story short, the zoo began because someone donated a monkey to the Sanford fire department. People then began just giving the fire department various critters. Eventually, the police department said that it was too much, so they had to create a more official facility. (Official is being used loosely here.) However, once this zoo was established, different people continued to present random animals to the zoo, and so it just grew from there. My favorite story involved a man just presenting an alligator to the police department for the zoo. Stories such as that one continued until eventually the zoo was moved to a larger location and became the Central Florida Zoo, which by all accounts is a very credible and official zoo.

Outside of going into that rabbit hole, this week I continued documenting and stabilizing archival papers. I moved on to newspaper articles from 1972 and 1973. Some of the recurring discussions I was seeing in the articles had to do with water usage and land annexation. It appears that the city of Casselberry in 1972 was dealing with some fairly serious water shortage issues. There were articles about the mayor asking citizens to be mindful about using water and discussions around acquiring better utility services.