With autumn comes the fall harvest. The doggerel below, from the April 1892 issue of Halligan’s The Illustrated World’s Fair, has a rural farmer anticipating the upcoming World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Poet W. H. Jewett may be referencing Littleville, Alabama, in the second verse.

A photograph of pumpkins from the California exhibit in the Agricultural Building, from a Kilburn stereoscope card. [Image from the Keystone-Mast Collection, UCR/California Museum of Photography, University of California at Riverside.]

FARMER HEDGEROW’S CONCLUSION

by W. H. JEWETT

Now John, my boy, plow good an’ deep an’ harrer every field—

We’ll take a little extry pains an’ git a better yield.

I’m sure we’ve got as good a farm as there is anywhere,

So why not raise some truck to show at that Columby Fair?

—

The county fair, y’ know, was held at Littleville last fall,

An’ I took prizes ’till it seemed I’d got ’em nearly all.

They give me first, y’ ricollict, on pumpkins, corn an’ oats

An’ likewise on m y Cotswold lambs an’ on my Berkshire shoats.

—

Now I’ve an idee, John, my boy, that it might pay to go

An’ take some samples of our stuff to that Columby show.

Who knows but we might git a prize? An’ anyway thay’ll be

A heap of interestin’ things that we had ort to see.

—

Chicago got that fair, y’ know, an’ it’s a fact, I guess,

That what that taown sets out to do is allers a success.

For it’s a mighty stirrin’ place, I’ve often heard it said,

An’ when it undertakes a thing it shoves it right ahead.

—

So John, my boy, plow good an’ deep au’ harrer every field —

We’ll take a little extry pains an’ git a better yield.

I’m sure we’ve got as good a farm as there is anywhere,

So why not raise some truck to show at that Columby Fair?

Panorama of a farm scene from the McCormick’s Harvesting Machines exhibit in the Agricultural Building of the 1893 World’s Fair. [Image from World’s Columbian Exposition Illustrated Sept. 1893.]