On any given day, tens or hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world visited the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. One visitor commented on the strange coincidence of meeting familiar people on the fairgrounds:

“Anyone merely passing among the thousands scattered over the Exposition grounds can get no idea of what a big patch of the earth they represent. You cannot guess how many of them came from long distances. A man who resides in a small city 200 miles from Chicago said yesterday that he had seen over fifty people from his town since morning. There had been no excursion. It was simply the beginning of the steady summer pilgrimage. Another man who now lives in Chicago, but formerly traveled all over the world, told about bumping into an Englishman whose acquaintance he had made at Cape Town, Africa.

When people go up in the captive balloon they are required to put their names and addresses into a register. This is a mere formality. If the rope broke and the balloon went out over the lake the folks on land would know who was missing. In one load that went up were eight men. Two were from Illinois, but only one from Chicago. One was from Massachusetts, one from New York, one from Ohio and one from Iowa. Another was an Englishman from London, and the eighth man was an Austrian. This was an ordinary handful picked from the multitude.”

Alas, the Captive Balloon was destroyed in a storm on July 9. It would be interesting to know if the registry book survives.

“Along the Plaisance” by Charles Graham. [Image from From Peristyle to Plaisance or the White City Picturesque Painted in Water Colors by C. Graham. Winters Art Litho Co., 1894.]

SOURCE

“World’s Fair Cigars” Chicago Record Jun. 13, 1893, p. 3.