Miss Congo
At the Park Opera House on Main and Church streets, and later the Duval Theater, Jim Burbridge offered Jacksonville the finest entertainment of the late 1800’s and early '90s: Sarah Bernhardt, Ethel Barrymore, vaudeville, Miss Congo.
So it was a fitting match for Congo, the mountain gorilla from Africa, to live first in Jim's brother Bill's nearby downtown real estate office, then to reside with showman Jim and Juanita Burbridge in their backyard. Congo was the first female gorilla from her African neighborhood to move to the United States, and hers was an engaging suite on the St. Johns river, now Pointe La Vista.
In 1911, Bill Burbridge commissioned Henry Klutho to design the seven-story Burbridge Hotel with fancy private baths and a hotel lobby to display hunting trophies from Alaska and Africa. Fortunately, Miss Congo was not part of the collection. The Burbridge, at Forsyth and Clay Streets, became the Floridan, and was demolished in 1981.
The great provider of the brothers’ African treasures was still another brother, Ben Burbridge, who was an internationally known game hunter and also an owner of an early Jacksonville real estate company. He captured Miss Congo in 1925. He also delivered the first gorilla to Europe at the Antwerp Zoo.
As Ben Burbridge lived in his office building, with a private bath, while his wife resided in New York City, Miss Congo, unaccustomed to hotel life, chose brother Jim’s backyard as her domicile. She was visited often by the local citizens, and sometimes on Sunday, cars parked in long lines at the Burbridge property.
Congo, estimated to be 4 years old on her arrival, was a popular resident of Jacksonville, engendering all the excitement of a traveling circus. To some extent, Miss Congo’s experience abroad was more congenial than many captured animals, but her life was short and she was often depressed.
The famous psychologist and naturalist from Yale, Professor Robert Yerkes, made several trips to the Burbridge backyard in 1925 and 1926 to study Miss Congo. There was no bloodletting as in recent gorilla testing, because his examinations, based on her hunger instinct, were emotional and mental in nature. She was tested to see how cleverly and quickly she could solve problems to obtain food.
Professor Yerkes developed the Yerkes-Dodson law relating motivation to performance, and he devised a number of fun games for Miss Congo such as placing a banana just inches from her reach and providing her various-length sticks with which to reach the goal of retrieving it and gobbling it down. He stated that it took him longer to contrive the tests than it did for her to solve them.
Yerkes, mainly a comparative psychologist, had studied primates for a number of years and commented that young chimpanzees were effervescent, jolly, outgoing and generally annoying. He described the behavior of some male gorillas as playful, beating their chests, etc.
However, the young Miss Congo, was pensive, reserved and melancholic. Sometimes she exhibited irritation when he swiped her food as she tried to eat, but she internalized her anger. He described her as emotionally aloof and reserved, perhaps exhibiting a superiority complex. She had pet dogs, but did not respond to them, either.
No doubt Miss Congo would have been happier had she returned home. Instead, she was donated to the Bronx zoo, which today promotes The Congo Gorilla Forest, a 6.5 acre habitat, as well as worldwide conservation projects. Unfortunately for Miss Congo, she was before her time and became more depressed by the separation. She was visited by Juanita Burbridge, a writer, to cheer her up and in whose popular books Miss Congo was featured prominently.
In 1927, hopefully to recover from “mental depression” the forlorn creature moved to live with the birds and dogs at Ca' d’Zan, the mansion of John Ringling of circus fame, in Sarasota. She died a year later, age 7, 30 to 40 years prematurely. Her only natural enemy was humankind.
