A Fair to Remember
Posts about the history of
the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago
Ontario’s Mammoth Squash at the 1893 World’s Fair
So many things were big, big, BIG at the 1893 World’s Fair that it may have been easy to miss the world’s biggest squash. On display in the Horticultural Building in late September was a quarter-ton “monster squash” from Canada. Gourdzilla received some proud coverage back home in the September 29, 1893, issue of the Windsor Star, which reported on the sensational vegetable: “Ontario is again the sensation provider [...]
Remembering Nancy Green, Aunt Jemima, and the 1893 World’s Fair
Though relatively unknown at the time, one participant in the 1893 World’s Fair later became a famous fixture of food advertising and a part of many people’s kitchens for more than a century. For the past ninety-seven years, the final resting place of the real woman behind the character was an unmarked plot of grass in a cemetery on Chicago’s South Side. A sign welcoming guests to the [...]
Opening Day at the 1893 World’s Fair
“The Electric Button” [Image (colorized) from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, May 18, 1893.] Opening Day at the World's Columbian Exposition, May 1, 1893, brought “the greatest crowd Chicago has ever seen or probably ever will witness” into Jackson Park. The tally of total visitors inside the fairground, was close to 400,000, with 242,000 people buying tickets at the gate and another 150,000 arriving with pre-purchased souvenir tickets. The event [...]
A Tribute to Harlow N. Higinbotham, President of the World’s Columbian Exposition
On April 18, 1919, the former president of the World’s Columbian Exposition met a tragic death. Harlow N. Higinbotham was visiting New York to “meet the boys” of Illinois who had recently returned from serving in the U.S. military during the Great War. The eighty-year-old Chicagoan set out from his residence at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Central Park to the New York headquarters of the Illinois Soldiers' Welcome Committee [...]
Echoes of the White City Postscript: “One of the Funniest and Best Things of the Kind”
Midway-themed charity bazaars and fairs were a trend sweeping across America throughout 1894 and beyond. Echoes of the White City could be heard from coast to coast.
Echoes of the White City Part 4: “Heard No More”
In 1894, Chicago socialites rebuilt a miniature version of the great Midway Plaisance from the 1893 World’s Fair inside of two downtown armories. “Echoes of the White City—The Midway” culminated in a “Grand Finale” on November 27.
Echoes of the White City Part 3: “Fourteen Villages and a Jail”
Entering Battery D Armory, visitors to “Echoes of the White City” faced a replica in miniature of one of the greatest attractions of the 1893 World’s Fair
Echoes of the White City Part 2: “A Midway in Miniature”
For two weeks in November of 1894, an ersatz Midway Plaisance sprang to life inside of the Battery D Armory and Second Regiment Armory buildings in downtown Chicago.
Echoes of the White City Part 1: Chicago Society’s 1894 Charity Bazaar
When the Midway reopened in 1894, the Ferris Wheel had only four passenger cars, the girls in the Congress of Beauty had to shave their faces, and the famous “belly dance” was performed by a male window decorator from Marshall Field’s.As carriages pulled up along Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s society folk were greeted by a fat, little man wearing “trousers that might have been intended for twin balloons,” a fez, and [...]
First to the Fair
At the 1893 World’s Fair were displayed many “firsts,” including the largest enclosed space ever built, the first electric railway, and the first mechanical dishwasher. So what were the first exhibits to come to the Columbian Exposition? The two notices below, from the June 1891 and February 1892 issues of World’s Columbian Exposition Illustrated, reveal that Washington State and Japan sent the first American and first foreign exhibits to [...]