Workers Escaping Death at the 1893 World’s Fair

The excerpt below, from The Chicago Record’s History of the World’s Fair, reminds us of the dangerous work that thousands of laborers (mostly immigrants) faced as they built the White City of 1893. The Medical Bureau of the Columbian Exposition officially reported only thirty-two deaths during construction of the fairgrounds. Luckily, the workers mentioned below escaped that fate.

[Note: Although the article mentions the first accident happening at the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, the location likely was the Agricultural Building, for which New York artist George W. Maynard executed all the decorative paintings in the pavilion and porticoes.]

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Some curious instances of miraculous escape from death were known at the Exposition hospital. Perhaps the most curious as a coincidence happened to an assistant of artist G. W. Maynard and three workmen employed with him on the decorations of the manufacturers [sic] building. The four men were on the end of a horizontal platform twenty-five feet from the ground. The end of the platform jutted over the upright support several feet and the combined weight pulled out the spike fastenings that secured it to the upright. The four men fell. Each of the three laborers broke his leg at the ankle with almost exactly the same fractures, but the artist escaped with nothing worse than a serious jarring and a few scratches. He had come down on top of his companions, and their bodies probably saved him a month or two in bed.

An Irishman at work on the horticulture building secured the palm for humorous accidents. He fell sixty-six feet from the roof at the southwest corner of the building and alighted sitting bolt upright on a convenient sand pile. After a moment of reflection he arose, brushed the sand from his trousers and remarked: “Thot was the divil of a fall.”

A guard who rushed up wanted to call a patrol wagon and take the man to the hospital.

“An’ why?” said surprised Patrick, “an’ why should I go? Will I lose my tolme and be docked? divil a bit will I. They’ll be dockin’ me now if I shtay longer,” and away he went, muttering imprecations on the stupidity of guards.

Another case was that of a Pole who fell twenty feet on the traveling derrick of the manufactures building and landed with his back balanced across a beam 200 feet from the floor, swaying and clutching in the air, his senses almost benumbed. Just as he was about to fall into the fearful depths a fellow workman reached him, and grasping the now-limp figure held him until help came to them both in the form of a rope swung from above.

In still another case an iron-worker ascending the ladder inside the administration dome was struck full in the forehead by a monkey wrench dropped by a workman above him. He swayed in the air, seemed to make one final effort to retain consciousness, gripped the ladder round with a death grip and hung there until he was rescued, although he had no recollection afterward of anything after the block struck him.

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SOURCE

The Chicago Record’s History of the World’s Fair. Chicago Daily News Co., 1893. pp. 14–15.