The Tift Park Zoo’s Founding Father
[image error]Ask most Albanians about the first director of the Tift Park Zoo and they might assume you are referring to W. T. Hill. Technically, they would be correct, but Mr. Hill was hired as director of the zoo in the early 1970s. The zoo had already been in place for nearly forty years.
The person who deserves the credit for developing Albany’s zoo and guiding its progress for the first quarter of a century of its existence is the man who acquired some of the first animals and the man who oversaw the building of their cages. It was customary for early zoo directors to live on the property so they could tend to all manner of problems at all hours of the day and night. The first director of the Tift Park Zoo lived within easy walking distance. His home was a few blocks from the Park in a house on Jefferson Street where the Phoebe Putney parking lot now sits. Historical evidence points to W. Carl Smith, the city’s superintendent of parks and cemeteries, as the Tift Park Zoo’s first director.
Early records are hard to find but by April 11, 1937, according to an Albany Herald article, Carl Smith was supervising the construction of a new home for “Albany’s monkeys”. The article described it as a large cage, 28 feet by 10 feet.
When completed it will house all the monkeys in one cage where visitors to the zoo can enjoy them. One section of the cage, 12 x 10 feet, will be open and in it will be a large cedar tree with sturdy limbs in which the monkeys can swing and play. The other section, 16 x 10 feet, will be covered and will have in it a small house for the monkeys. The concrete floor, which can be cleaned easily, has been poured. The cage is enclosed with heavy cyclone wire. It is so placed that visitors to the zoo can see and feed the monkeys better than in their present location and yet the monkeys cannot reach out and touch the visitors. The cage will be completed in about ten days.
Carl Smith sounds like a typical zoo director when he is quoted as saying, “By moving the monkeys we are getting all of our zoo in one location. Visitors at the zoo will derive more pleasure if the exhibits are all together.”
The article goes on to note that the zoo had fifty-four alligators in its collection, a bear that required some cage modifications, and a young owl “that was brought to the zoo when it was only a few days old”.
“When the owl gets larger,” Smith said, “it will have to be caged, but at present it has the freedom of the park”.
How Smith acquired the original animals for his zoo is not known, but I suspect that few, if any, were purchased. The bear, alligators, and owl were probably orphans or nuisance animals. The monkeys were most likely former pets. One typical circumstance was reported by the Herald on June 10th, 1939 when a “Coatimundi bear” was donated to the zoo at Tift Park by Mr. & Mrs. C. E. Kenner. [Note: A coati mundi is not a bear. It is a member of the raccoon family native to the Americas.]
Two years after Carl Smith constructed the monkey cages, he described Tift Park in a 1939 Albany Herald article as the largest of the City’s parks at thirty-four acres. By that time, it contained tennis courts, a swimming pool, playgrounds, a softball diamond, and a large picnic pavilion.
“Another popular attraction at this park,” Smith declared, “is a small zoo containing alligators, raccoons, monkeys, pigeons, rabbits, and other small animals”.
A decade later, in July 1950, a Lee County Journal article suggested that Albany city officials were hoping to build a new zoo. This intriguing but unverified account said:
Provision for the construction of a new zoo has been made in the City’s budget for the next fiscal year beginning Sept 1st, according to City Manager Donald P. Wolfer.
The amount needed to construct the new zoo has been estimated in the suggested budget at $10,000, Mr. Wolfer said. Some work has been done toward the plans for the zoo, but the city manager said the plans will not be completed until and unless the city commissioners place their stamp of approval on the project.
Meanwhile, W. Carl Smith, Superintendent of Parks, in search of new ideas for the zoo, has been inspecting zoos in other towns, one of them in Washington, D.C.
Carl Smith’s “new ideas for the zoo” in Albany never materialized. He died a few years later in January 1956 at the age of sixty-six.
His friend and co-worker, retired city engineer John Sperry, remembers Carl Smith as a salt-of-the-earth type of guy—a good man who knew everybody and everybody knew him.
One of Carl Smith’s grandsons, Carlos Phillips, remembers his granddaddy as a quiet, unassuming man who rode around town with a monkey in the front seat of his car and who, when planning a new monkey island exhibit, traveled to Montgomery, Alabama to study the monkey island exhibit at their zoo. According to family lore, granddaddy was responsible for the planting of the iconic oak trees that line Albany’s avenues.
On January 9th, 1956 the Albany City Commission passed a posthumous resolution honoring W. Carl Smith for his years of service as Superintendent of Parks and Cemeteries.
Smith’s obituary noted that he was the secretary of his Masonic lodge and he was a leader at Albany’s First Methodist Church, as the plaque in the church hallway attests:
Dedicated to the memory of W. Carl Smith who served faithfully for 36 years as teacher and superintendent of our church school. 1920 – 1956.
But something is missing in all these tributes. W. Carl Smith was, as far as I can tell, the father of Albany’s park system and most notably, the Tift Park Zoo. Those people who remember the lion’s roars that once reverberated across the city, can thank Carl Smith. My friends who recall riding the train from Sylvester on field trips to the Tift Park Zoo can thank Carl Smith. And those who admit to sneaking into the zoo at night to cause mischief—well you get the idea.
