Classical Temple of Unhewn Logs: World’s Fair in the Wilderness 1909

At the groundbreaking ceremony for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (AYP), the president of the Seattle Exposition declared: “We are a new country looking forward to the future with confidence and hope, and we contemplate great commercial results from the exploitation of the vast, underdeveloped resources of Alaska and the Yukon Territory.”1  Such buoyant rhetoric was shared by others who drew attention to the fairgrounds’ proximity to vast tracks of wilderness.  Another chronicler noted: “An international exposition will be held. . . with its back door opening upon the wildest and grandest portion that still remains of America’s primeval forest.”2

   Of all the displays at the AYP, none more explicitly expressed the fair’s colonialist agenda of the exploitation of the wilderness than the Forestry Building constructed entirely of western red cedar.  Located at the eastern edge of the fairgrounds, with lush, forested land behind it, the building’s classical façade faced west toward the main fairgrounds and paralleled the Beaux-Arts style of the principal palaces.  Its back, by contrast, emerged out of the forest, as if its location served as a reminder of the recent memory of the logs, having only just been cut from their “natural” setting, to be transformed into the Forestry Building devoted to the management of such resources for human needs.   This paper examines the so-called Temple of Timber through the lenses of colonialism and ecocriticism.

1 Frank L. Merrick, “The Northwest’s Exposition,” Sunset Magazine, September 1907, 420.  
2  C. H. E. Asquith, “Seattle’s Coming Exposition,” Sunset Magazine, April 1909, 440. 

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Bio

Sarah J. Moore is Professor of American Art History at the University of Arizona.   Questions regarding the shifting terrain of identities and geographies animate her work as a scholar and teacher of art in the United States. Her research areas intersect with the global interdisciplinary arena of world’s fair studies, considering in particular pre-World War I fairs in the United States, and ecocriticism in visual culture. Recent publications include: “The Panama Canal as a Hybrid Zone: A Case Study,” in Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture  (Routledge, 2020); “The Great American Desert is No More,”  in Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition of 1898-99 (University of Nebraska Press, 2018); and ‘Mosquitoes, Malaria, and Cold Butter: Discourses of Health and Progress in the Panama Canal Zone, 1904-1915,” Panorama ( Fall 2017).  She is the 2021-2022 Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan.