The Story Behind the Zoo’s Sentinel Dog
The iconic bronze dog statue is 172 years old — and that's not even in dog years.
Photography courtesy of Roger Williams Park Zoo.
When Leigh Picard asks new employees to guess the oldest animal at Roger Williams Park Zoo, he usually gets a slew of responses: the elephants, perhaps? A tortoise? No one ever picks the Sentinel, the bronze dog statue that generations of children have perched upon for years. “It’s a fixture in the zoo,” says Picard, the zoo’s manager of interpretation and graphics. “Families not only take a picture with it; they regularly make it part of their routine.”
Photography courtesy of Roger Williams Park Zoo.
Just as interesting as its age — 172, and that’s not even in dog years — is the lore behind the Sentinel. Some details are murky and lost to time, but legend has it that the statue is based on a real dog,
Photography courtesy of Roger Williams Park Zoo.
“Black Prince,” a mastiff who broke his chain alerting his family to a fire at their Benefit Street home in 1849. Providence sculptor and painter Thomas Frederick Hoppin later married Anna Almy Jenkins, one of two children who escaped the blaze, built a new home on the site and christened it with his sculpture, cast at the Gorham Company, in 1851. The Sentinel remained on the front lawn of the Hoppin home until 1896, when the family donated it to the city of Providence. There, it was placed in the Japanese Garden at Roger Williams Park before coming to the zoo in the late 1960s or 1970s and being made immortal in countless family photographs taken throughout the decades.
“I don’t know how much is 100-percent true,” Picard says, “but it’s a great story based on true elements.”
Photography courtesy of Roger Williams Park Zoo.
