John L. Campbell couldn’t have anticipated what he began.
Campbell, a professor of arithmetic, pure philosophy, and astronomy at Wabash Faculty in Crawfordsville, Indiana, wrote to each the Smithsonian Establishment and the Mayor of Philadelphia in December 1866, suggesting the nation maintain a World’s Truthful in Philadelphia in 1876, which might additionally commemorate the a hundredth anniversary of the nation’s founding.
Philadelphia took him up on his suggestion. The remaining, as they are saying, is historical past. The truthful was a smashing success, celebrating the nation’s spirit in addition to its industrial and entrepreneurial genius — it’s the place Alexander Graham Bell launched the world to the phone — and ultimately led to 2 extra nationwide “birthday events,” which shall be coated in later installments on this collection, in addition to one other coming in 2026. It additionally served as an essential inflection level within the path towards girls’s rights.
However first, let’s return to 1876, when not less than 9.8 million folks paid 50 cents to attend the truthful, held on the Fairmount Park grounds, then the biggest city open house within the nation. A further two million folks attended however weren’t charged for tickets.
President Ulysses S. Grant was readily available on Might 10, 1876 to open the occasion, together with Brazil’s Emperor Dom Pedro II. Grant was not within the metropolis on July 4 of that 12 months, a lot to Philadelphia’s consternation, however he did attend the closing ceremonies in November. The Centennial was thought of a hit – it didn’t lose cash (it even made a tiny revenue) and it confirmed Individuals what the long run would maintain.
Competitors for the occasion
Wanting again, celebrating the delivery of America on its a hundredth birthday in Philadelphia might sound a no brainer, however New York and Boston each made efforts to host the occasion, based on Lori Salganicoff, an city planner and self-described “Philadelphia fanatic.”
“There had been some jockeying by some locations, New York particularly, to host it,” Salganicoff mentioned. “Preliminary public dialogue and dissent over the exhibition web site cooled media curiosity within the celebration, with some advocating for Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York and St. Louis over Philadelphia. This, and the monetary panic of 1873, challenged fundraising and organizing, amongst different issues.”
“I discovered an entertaining, salty commercial out of New York Metropolis, wrongly describing that Philadelphia was an inferior alternative in comparison with New York,” she continued. “However along with being the town with the ‘room the place it occurred,’ Philadelphia provided the positioning of Fairmount Park, a wonderful transportation community, citywide attraction and had a precedent for a smaller truthful in 1864 that succeeded on account of a mix of public, personal and industrial efforts. New York’s personal truthful precedent had not been profitable.”
In 1871, with help from distinguished businessmen akin to John Wanamaker, native political leaders and the Franklin Institute, the town and state efficiently petitioned Congress to authorize the Centennial and arrange a fee to supervise planning and implementation, Salganicoff mentioned.
That 12 months, Congress handed laws to carry an “Exposition of American and International Arts, Merchandise and Manufacture,” establishing the U.S. Centennial Fee after it was introduced with a plan that proposed a theme of patriotism, American industrial talent and nationwide unity. President Grant appointed commissioners from every state and territory, with suggestions from their governors.
The Centennial, she mentioned, “formally named the ‘The Worldwide Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Merchandise of the Soil and Mine,’ was completely different from prior world’s gala’s as its authentic said objective was not a industrial one, however moderately a commemoration to the founding of a nation of free folks, and to progress in human ingenuity — an exhibition of sources and resourcefulness.”
Among the many exhibitors on the truthful was Bell, who confirmed off his newest invention, the phone, for the primary time ever.
Congress had initially not appropriated any funds, having left that to the U.S. Centennial Fee, however it was lower than the duty. The Metropolis of Philadelphia kicked in $1.5 million, Pennsylvania granted $1 million, and Congress voted for a “mortgage” of $1.5 million, which the town thought they might not should repay, however ultimately it was paid again. Congress additionally created the Centennial Board of Finance in June 1872 to boost funds by means of the sale of inventory.
Virtually 250 buildings had been constructed for the occasion, throughout 236 acres in Fairmount Park. 4 stay in the present day.
Greater than 30 international locations despatched contributions to the Exhibition, and rulers from as far-off as Brazil traveled to Philadelphia.
The arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty was placed on show on the Centennial. The statue was accomplished and erected in New York in 1886.
The centerpiece of Equipment Corridor and the most well-liked exhibit was the Corliss engine. Novelist William Dean Howels wrote of it in “Harper’s Weekly” journal: “(Rising) loftily within the middle of the large construction, an athlete of metal and iron with not a superfluous ounce of steel on it.”
“This was a time of nice scientific, transportation and industrial progress all over the world, and all had been hungry to study from and share their very own proud improvements with others. Additionally at play had been political efforts to reconstruct the U.S. after the Civil Conflict, political reunification of the North and South, the panic of 1873, and the burgeoning age of industrialism,” she added.
Philadelphia’s famend artist Thomas Eakins painted The Gross Clinic for the Centennial. It pictured a medical operation and is taken into account one of many iconic items of American artwork, however was denied set up on the Centennial Artwork Gallery (later Memorial Corridor) as a result of it was thought of too graphic. As an alternative, the portray was hidden away in a nook of the U.S. Military Put up Hospital reveals elsewhere on the truthful.
Girls and the Centennial exhibition
Based on Salganicoff, one other vital political facet was the therapy and presence of ladies within the Centennial. For leaders of the ladies’s rights motion, there was a stress over whether or not to make the perfect of what was provided by specializing in girls’s achievements, or use the chance to battle for girls’s proper to vote and maintain public workplace.
“Members of the Nationwide Lady Suffrage Affiliation — led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage — thought avoiding political activism in the course of the Centennial was a mistake because it acquiesced to a patriarchal social order. They noticed the Centennial as a chance to attract consideration to girls’s suffrage, and members of the group crashed the July 4 festivities at Independence Corridor to current the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Girls’ to a stunned Vice President Thomas Ferry,” Salganicoff added.
One other group of ladies, she mentioned, led by Elizabeth Duane Gillespe, a great-granddaughter of Ben Franklin, took benefit of this as a chance for higher management and influence inside imposed constraints, elevating funds for the constructing and exhibiting of innovations and artistic works that many discovered revelatory. Greater than 75 girls exhibited innovations for which they’d secured patents; the steam engine powering the reveals within the Pavilion was run by a younger lady named Emma Allison.
“The principle exercise of this Girls’s Centennial Committee was to arrange a particular exhibit of ladies’s work, for which ample house had initially been reserved and promised within the Foremost Constructing. In June 1875, nevertheless, the boys of the Centennial Fee suggested feminine organizers that this show was now not doable. Requests from overseas exhibitors had multiplied so quickly that the realm allotted to every applicant needed to be considerably restricted.
“With lower than a 12 months earlier than opening, they had been advised that if girls hoped to exhibit their work, they must erect a separate constructing for its show and bear the complete price themselves,” Salganicoff mentioned.
“The Girls’s Centennial Committee set in movement its profitable fundraising equipment for its personal constructing. Appeals had been made, by means of native committees, to the ladies of the varied states and territories. The response was so favorable that in lower than 4 months the complete price of $31,160 for the Lady’s Constructing had been raised and development begun. Hundreds of extra {dollars} had been obtained to satisfy associated bills for the remainder of the truthful. Promoters, for example, paid well-known composer Richard Wagner $5,000 in gold to compose the ‘Centennial Inauguration March,’ and so they sponsored a lady’s journal, a kindergarten, a Catalogue of Charities, a nationwide cookbook, and a collection of symphony live shows,” she mentioned.
“From the beginning, this group of Centennial girls expressed their biggest concern over the query of ladies’s development. They printed The New Century, an eight-page weekly paper, printed on the Lady’s Constructing and financed fully by the Girls’s Centennial Committee,” mentioned Salganicoff. “This pro-feminist journal, edited by Sarah Hallowell of Philadelphia, attacked the cultural and institutional limitations which prevented girls from acquiring equality and justice.”
The paper referred to as for girls’s monetary autonomy and insisted upon equitable compensation and alternative for all feminine endeavors.
A celebration of progress
Within the “Illustrated Historical past of the Centennial Exhibition,” James D. McCabe wrote of his hope that America’s materials progress can be hastened by the exhibition:
“The farmer noticed new machines, seeds and processes; the mechanic, ingenious innovations and instruments, and merchandise of the best workmanship; the instructor, the tutorial aids and system of the world; the person of science, the wonders of nature and the outcomes of the innovations of the perfect brains of all lands. Thus every returned to his residence with a retailer of data accessible in his personal particular commerce or occupation.”
After it ended, a lot of the exhibition’s buildings had been torn down or moved. Memorial Corridor and the Horticulture Corridor remained. The horticultural constructing was demolished after struggling injury from Hurricane Hazel within the Fifties. Memorial Corridor is now the house of the Please Contact Youngsters’s Museum.
Two smaller buildings, known as “consolation stations,” at the moment are used for storage. Of the 27 states that despatched homes, solely the one from Ohio remains to be standing. Made from marble and different stones culled from 21 quarries within the state, every quarry positioned a stone with its title engraved in it on the home. Right this moment, the constructing is the house of the Conservancy of Fairmount Park.