The Little Zoo Up the Hill by Dustin Rice

After hearing rumors of an abandoned zoo within a couple hours of home, Morgan and I knew we had to make it a part of our project. It was in Cisco, a town I had driven past at least fifty times on I-20, on the road between Dallas and Abilene, though I’d never stopped. 

It took just under a year for the zoo’s concrete to be poured and its wrought iron to be erected. The backside of the town’s brand-new dam, built in 1923, was the chosen location. It was right next to another new entertainment venue, the world’s largest concrete pool. Built by a New Deal construction crew and manned by local, unemployed laborers, Cisco’s latest attractions became the center for weekend travel for hundreds of miles around.

The zoo evolved as it grew, adding fishponds, native bird exhibits, and even a large monkey cage. It was forced to adapt, as animals seemed to die just as quickly as expansions were made. They had a red deer stag that died early on, presumably because it was kept in dank conditions as the zoo was being constructed. There was a bear, which was rumored to have been donated by a Caddo woman after she had raised it from a sick, abandoned cub. It died a few years

into its time on exhibit as well: whether for fun, out of boredom, or just to ruin things for everyone, someone snuck in at night and poisoned him. The bear’s short stay at the zoo is documented with a picture in the 1927 Cisco High School yearbook.

I found a number of interesting anecdotes in old message boards during the course of my research. One post stands out in particular, from May 29, 2007. A man named Charles Porter inquired about the location of the zoo and shared his memories of a day he spent there as a six-year-old. Charles’s Aunt Fannie Bess took his brothers, a cousin, and him to the pool and the zoo for the day. While they were walking through the exhibits, “…a very unhappy monkey escaped from its cage and began making threatening advances toward us. Aunt F.B. was kept quite busy trying to hide us all behind her and ward off the monkey with an umbrella at the same time.” I have no idea what kind of staff the zoo had, but it must have been a chaotic scene getting that monkey back into its cage.

Like many of its animals, the zoo itself didn’t last either. The Depression took away funding and, like so many places of its kind, it went out of business in the late 1930’s. The zoo fell into disrepair and was soon taken over by the hill itself. It was all but forgotten until 2021, when a group of locals called SAFE (Students, Athletics, Families, and Education) proposed a cleanup. With the help of the surrounding community, they opened it into a walking and hiking trail system that accesses the old zoo grounds.

That’s how we found ourselves hiking there in the late fall of 2021. We weren’t alone: the parking lot was half-filled in the late afternoon, as news of the new trails had spread. Evidence of the clearing was everywhere and freshly cut limbs on old oak trees revealed previously unseen graffiti. This was once a place where local teens gathered. I was amazed by all the old wrought iron—the cages were curled, bent, and broken by trees that had fallen over the last century, making them look like metal sculptures in some cases, like old bones in others.

Soon enough I found myself at the bear exhibit. I had never had the opportunity to see a zoo from an animal’s perspective, which I then realized was why I came there. I had to be in that den, to shoot from the bear’s point of view. I crawled in and began taking photographs. Once I reached the back, where the bear slept, I peered out and was very suddenly uncomfortable. I had the sensation of helplessness, of complete isolation. I took a picture in that instant, and it was easily the most striking moment of my day there.

Once a dump, forgotten and abandoned, Cisco has remade the little zoo on the side of the hill. It’s been given a second life and now has function again, as a place for the public to hike, to enjoy nature, and to tour a previous era. In a matter of a few minutes, the trails take you back a hundred years. It’s interesting to find yourself staring into empty cages, looking down into dry ponds, gazing through gnarled bars at abandoned dens, and imagining it as it once was.