Between May and October 1893, Chicago’s Jackson Park hosted 27 million tourists to the World’s Columbian Exposition, an event that brought the entire world together within a 600-acre park. The intentionally ephemeral Fair, with its over 200 buildings supported by a network of cutting-edge infrastructure, seemed too immense to materially disappear; yet it did. This talk draws from an archaeological and archival project focusing on the White City and Midway Plaisance of the 1893 Chicago Fair, which revealed the robust archaeological signature of its extensive sanitary infrastructure, the plaster remains of the Fair’s Ohio State Building, and bits of mundane domestic items that allow us to understand how the material destruction of the Fair was harnessed to further its ideological messages. A look at results from excavations at the 1892 Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Charnley House provides a contemporaneous domestic site to see how these messages were consumed at home. 

 

Rebecca S. Graff is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Lake Forest College and author of Disposing of Modernity: The Archaeology of Garbage and Consumerism During Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair (University Press of Florida, 2020).