Today in History—April 13: America Welcomes Its First Pachyderm

A vintage black-and-white illustration of an elephant, representing the first elephant in the United States, with its trunk and the platform beneath it highlighted in orange. — April 13, 1796: America welcomed its first elephant

On this day in 1796, New York City welcomed America’s first elephant—an Asian elephant from Bengal. Jacob Crowninshield of Salem, Massachusetts, paid $450 (about $11,000 today) for the elephant; he planned to leverage the animal’s fame and resell her for $5,000 (about $125,000 today) later.

The elephant, a two-year-old female, departed Calcutta, India, in December 1795 aboard the vessel America, of which Crowninshield was captain. The ship’s log was kept by a young officer named Nathaniel Hathorne—who would later father that other, more famous Nathaniel Hawthorne (the author added the w).

Crowninshield debuted the animal 10 days after arriving in New York, at the corner of Beaver Street and Broadway, near present-day Battery Park, charging the public 25 cents to see her. No one really knew how to care for an elephant, so this one dined on greens and liquor, but she was described as silky and healthy-looking, about the size of an ox, and tame and friendly.

Fun Fact

Jacob Crowninshield later became a Massachusetts senator.

Crowninshield was right about her star power; he soon sold the elephant for the princely sum of $10,000, and she toured the East Coast for the next two decades, making stops in such cities as Philadelphia, Salem, Baltimore, Charleston, and Boston. In the latter, exhibitors tried to double the fare but balked when demand dropped. The public crowded the exhibition when the original price was restored.

The elephant—who was never given a name, or at least not one that’s recorded anywhere—was widely celebrated. With one caveat: A Newburyport, Massachusetts, newspaper warned onlookers not to approach her while carrying important papers, as she had already destroyed many. (We’re not sure why you’d bring documents to an elephant viewing, but apparently so many people did that a warning had to be issued.)

It had been a long, long time—at least 10,000 years, dating back to the end of the Ice Age—since this continent had an elephant on it. And when one finally returned, she came with all the spectacle you’d expect.