The third-place winner of kids’s attraction in the 2023 Chronogram Reader’s Choice Awards is back this year: this time as a first-place winner with a new name. On June 7, the Trevor-Lovejoy Zoo and the Millbrook School held a ceremony to add “Lovejoy” onto its original name. This is in honor of Dr. Tom Lovejoy, who graduated from the Millbrook School in 1959. As Daniel Cohen, the director of media for the Trevor-Lovejoy Zoo states, Dr. Lovejoy “credited the zoo as changing the course of his life.”
The story of how the Trevor-Lovejoy Zoo started is a favorite of Cohen’s. The zoo was originally founded in 1936, when a young biology teacher Frank Trevor arrived at Millbrook with animal crates in the back of his station wagon. “These are my animals,” Cohen credits Trevor as saying. “But now they’re the Millbrook Zoo.”
Now, almost a century later, the zoo is home to a diversity of animal guests. This includes eight of the world’s less than 300 endangered red wolves. Four of these wolves were born on the zoo’s property just this spring. The zoo is also home to three other endangered species: red pandas, ringtail lemurs, and black-and-white ruffed lemurs. Cohen is particularly proud of the way the zoo is set up, making it so many of these animals can live in the same natural habitats they would be living in in the real world. “Our otters live in a real river!” Cohen exclaims. “It’s about as natural of a setting as a zoo could be.”
With its small size and reasonable ticket price, the Trevor-Lovejoy Zoo is a family-oriented and accessible way to see these incredible animals up close and personal in the Hudson Valley. However, the zoo is more than a way to spend a day. When asked about the bigger mission of the zoo, Cohen barely has to think before answering: “Our mission is pretty simple: making people care. If we can make [the visitors] care one bit about the animals here and their relatives in the wild, then we have done a good job.”
