Did you see the 1893 Fair? Prove it with a “Certificate of Visitation to the World’s Columbian Exposition”

You bought your train ticket and booked your lodging in Chicago, traveled to Jackson Park and paid your fifty-cent admission. You’ve finally made it into the City of Wonders, the Dream City, the White City … the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition fairgrounds. How will anyone believe you are here if you don’t purchase an official “Certificate of Visitation” to show friends back home?

The Certificate of Visitation

Step right up to get your souvenir document, printed on a thirteen-by-nine-and-a-half-inch paper and reading:

Certificate of Visitation to the
World’s Columbian Exposition
Issued to ___________ at the
World’s Columbian Exposition,
Held in Commemoration of the Four Hundredth Anniversary
Of the Discovery of America by Columbus.
Jackson Park, Chicago ___________ 1893

The engraving features a profile of Christopher Columbus in the center and a small view of the Administration Building and surrounding exhibition palaces in the lower left corner. An official World’s Columbian Exposition seal in dark gold is affixed uniformly over part of the latter image. Appearing at the bottom are the signatures of (on the left) H. O. Edmonds, Secretary, and (on the right) H. N. Higinbotham, President of the World’s Columbian Exposition Board of Directors.

Thousands sold

On March 22, 1893, the Exposition granted a concession contract to Lorenzo E. Dow “for the sale of certificates of attendance and visitation.” Harlow Higinbotham’s Report of the President lists $3,635.05 in gross receipts for Dow’s concession, of which $486.84 (13.4%) was paid to the Exposition. With what should have been very low overhead costs, this would have made a handsome profit for him. Since Mr. Dow charged twenty-five cents for each souvenir Certificate, these gross receipts indicate that he sold around 14,500 copies.

Interestingly, a number of the paper documents that survive all have serial numbers in the 276000–288000 range. Their corresponding dates run from late September through October, with serial numbers almost all in chronological order. This suggests that Dow did not start with a serial number of 1 and that, unless this selection represents sampling error, he sold around 12,000 Certificates, a number roughly consistent with the gross receipts.

The set of extant Certificates shows distinctly different handwriting used to add the name and date, indicating that Mr. Dow employed several others as calligraphers.

A story in the Chicago Tribune describes this concession as just appearing on the fairgrounds sometime in mid-September, consistent with the dates inscribed on known surviving copies, though another newspaper story from July 17 also mentions the souvenir documents. Based on the serial numbers and concession dates, Dow seems to have done a brisk business, selling a few hundred Certificates each day.

Variant certificate

Complicating this is a known variant of the Certificate, copies of which have much lower serial numbers. The L. Tom Perry Special Collections of the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University holds the Certificate of Visitation for Mormon leader Emmeline B. Wells, who was President of the Utah Women’s Suffrage Association and a presenter and session chair for the Congress of Representative Women. This Certificate bears the date May 17 and a serial number of 2318. This document, however, has a slightly different design, with the center text block reading:

This Certifies that ___________
Has been in attendance at the World’s Columbian Exposition
at Chicago, this ______ day of ______ 1893.

Signatures and titles of the President, followed by those of the Secretary, are positioned together on the right. The document also includes the line “Western Bank Note Company, Chicago. 3” At the bottom. The Western Bank Note Company were engravers and printers of bonds, stock certificates, bank notes, railway tickets, etc. (A reprint of this version was produced in 1992 from a copy in the American Bank Note Company archives.) Because these differences are small, and no other vendor approved to sell such certificates is recorded, it seems likely that this earlier version also came from Mr. Dow’s concession.

Who was the man behind the operation and why did fairgoers buy his paper souvenir?

The genius who conceived this scheme

The Chicago Tribune of October 8 describes “a newcomer who appeared with table, camping stool, and ink bottle the other morning.” Mr. Dow set up his concession in the northeast corner of the Administration Building (Pavilion A), “right by the path which President Higinbotham’s feet have worn in making his way to his office these summer mornings.”

“The new man wears a blonde mustache. He is a ‘professor’ of penmanship and he brought with him, beside his ink bottle, a stock of shading pens and a large quantity of beautifully lithographed certificates with a red seal attached. … Lorenzo E. Dow is the genius who conceived this scheme, and it has met with the official approval of the World’s Columbian Exposition. It is a concession, and there is a regular rake off for the Exposition.”

The Tribune then prints a rather unflattering quote that portrays Mr. Dow as a cynical huckster:

“‘Of course we catches ’em,’ said the man with the whiskers. ‘You can see by the number at the top the number of country people who gives up their good stuff for one of these certificates. How do we know that the man whose name is on the certificate is correct? Well, we get our quarter, see? That’s all we’re after. If a man wants to give up a quarter for a certificate for somebody else, well, he’s welcome. He can have seven if he wants them. If any burglars want these certificates to use as alibis, they know where we are. We never sleep. Our office hours are 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., see?’”

The final comment is disingenuous because, of course, the fairgrounds were not open twenty-four hours a day. His use of first-person plural may add support to the idea that he employed several salespersons/calligraphers.

“People buy all sorts of worthless things here”

An unkind description of Dow’s product comes from a reporter for the Pittsburgh Press who wrote about complainers at the Fair and lodged—apparently with no irony—this complaint about souvenirs such as the Certificate of Visitation:

“It is astonishing how many varieties of souvenirs there are on sale in all the buildings. From the time one enters in the morning till he leaves to go to bed he is solicited to buy souvenirs of every conceivable variety, from playing cards, containing 52 pictures of the buildings and other things, to silver spoons, Spanish shields and bogus jewelry of all sorts, but most amazing, it seems to me, is the issue of an ‘official’ certificate of one’s ‘visitation,’ as it is called. Fancy the world’s fair visitor returned home and spreading before his rural neighbor’s vision a duly signed and sealed certificate that he was at the great show! Well, people buy them. People buy all sorts of worthless things here, which, of course, helps to pay the world’s fair expenses. There are even souvenir Columbian postal cards delivered two for a nickel in a slot machine. Often the slot boxes have no cards in them, but the nickel never comes back, and the weary visitor may chew the cud of disappointment instead of sending to somebody far away a gaudily backed postal card from the grounds. Such a fraud is this souvenir postal at the rate of two for a nickel that notices are posted in the post office of the government building informing the public that the government does not sell them nor have anything to do with their sale.”

Lorenzo Everett Dow

Many thousands of World’s Fair visitors took home this “most amazing” souvenir from the ingenious Chicago entrepreneur. Lorenzo Everett Dow had lost his wife Lilian in February 1892, leaving him with a one-week-old daughter. He graduated from the Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1894 (the same year as did Ida Platt, the first Black woman admitted to the Illinois bar). Later, Dow served for twenty years as the Secretary-Treasurer of Hillsdale College in Michigan, before retiring in 1937. Perhaps sometime before his death on May 1, 1943 (coincidentally the fiftieth anniversary of the Opening Day of the Fair), Mr. Dow showed his own Certificate of Visitation to family or friends to remember the small part he played in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.

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SOURCES

Higinbotham, H. H. Report of the President to the Board of Directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Rand, McNally & Co., 1898.

“Kickers at the Fair” Pittsburgh (PA) Press July 17, 1893, p. 3.

“To Sell Articles at the Fair” Chicago Tribune Mar. 23, 1893, p. 8.