Escaped animals · Monmouth County
The Quinn Brook Zoo leopard
Contemporary reports; escape and search corroborated by an earlier AP dispatch
An Indian leopard broke out of the Quinn Brook Zoo near Middletown on August 5, 1926, and eluded armed searchers, a $100 reward, and a New York radio alarm for at least six days.
The escape
An Associated Press dispatch datelined Red Bank, August 6, reported that a full-grown Indian leopard had gained its freedom “yesterday” — August 5 — while keepers at the Quinn Brook Zoo on the state highway near Middletown were transferring it from the wooden shipping cage in which it had arrived from New York. The keepers stepped away for a minute; when they returned, a bar was broken and the leopard was gone. Municipal and state police, residents, and summer cottagers joined the search, and an alarm was broadcast over radio station WNYC in New York. A $100 reward was offered for the animal’s capture, dead or alive.
The search
A second AP dispatch, datelined Red Bank, August 8, reported armed men in automobiles and smaller parties of hunters still looking for the seventy-three-pound cat, which it said had escaped from the zoo four days earlier — a day off from the August 6 dispatch’s “yesterday.” It named a witness: Edward Wallace telephoned the zoo to say he had seen the animal on the Beacon Hill golf links at Atlantic Highlands, six miles from Middletown. Zoo employees and police searched the area but found no tracks. Townsfolk and farmers within a radius of twenty-five miles were keeping their children indoors and their livestock guarded. Owner Oliver Holton, who feared someone would be badly hurt before the animal was taken, was quoted: “The leopard is dangerous,” he said. “And I haven’t had a night’s sleep or a decent meal since it escaped.”
The archived clipping, datelined Red Bank on August 11, carries the search further. Searchers had by then spent three days beating the woods without success, and the paper believed the animal had not eaten since escaping six days earlier — which agrees with an August 5 escape. A farmer near Dover, described as several miles northwest of Red Bank, reported losing a chicken to an unidentified animal seen around his barnyard. Three leopard hunts in widely separated parts of the state had all failed the previous day. No later report describing a capture, death, or other resolution was located this session.
Sources and research limits
- Daily Kennebec Journal (Augusta, Me.), August 7, 1926, page 1, “Search on in New Jersey for Leopard” — Chronicling America full text reviewed; an AP dispatch datelined Red Bank, August 6, describing the escape, the Quinn Brook Zoo, and the $100 reward.
- Daily Kennebec Journal, August 9, 1926, page 1, “Escaped Indian Leopard Has New Jersey Folks Worried” — Chronicling America full text reviewed; an AP dispatch datelined Red Bank, August 8, naming witness Edward Wallace and quoting Oliver Holton. It is a separate, earlier dispatch than the archived clipping’s August 11 Red Bank item, which was not located in a digitized paper.
A search for a later capture or resolution notice in Chronicling America (New Jersey and neighboring-state titles, 1926) did not surface one; this does not rule out a local New Jersey paper not digitized in that collection. “Middleton” in the source text is treated as Middletown, Monmouth County, matching the archived clipping’s place name.