A Fair to Remember

Although almost forgotten today, the spectacular Detroit International Exposition & Fair of 1889 put the growing, pre-automotive city in the glare of the international spotlight, drawing attention to the metropolis’ potential, progress, and prosperity

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Fiji Jim was there. So were Professor Woodward and his trained seals. Professor Bartholomew, acclaimed “Balloon Ascension Specialist,” made his daring leap through the clouds. Miss Ida Williams, “The Female Colossus of Fat Women,” came to town, as did trainloads of manufacturers, salesmen, livestock handlers, city slickers, and country cousins. It was Detroit’s great fair, and everybody was welcome.

Nobody alive has a personal memory of the Detroit International Exposition & Fair of 1889, and no physical traces of the great exhibit hall — at the time, the largest such building in the world — remain. The attractively arranged site in Delray that fair patrons once strolled across in their starched blouses, sailor hats, pressed pants, and tight shoes is today part of the most polluted and forsaken neighborhood in the city.

Detroit’s “big show” of 1889 belonged to an era of ambitious fairs (the Eiffel Tower was unveiled that year at Paris’ fair, which commemorated the centennial of the French Revolution), but Detroit’s was unusual in that it did not celebrate an anniversary. Rather, it was principally an exercise in good old-fashioned civic boosterism, headed by a group of leading citizens whose names today grace various streets, parks, and buildings. “It is not to be an agricultural fair alone,” promoters boasted in a printed circular, “it is not to be merely an industrial fair; nor is it simply an exposition; but it is a grand combination of all these features, which makes it the greatest institution of its kind in the world.” Harper’s Weekly thought enough of the undertaking to devote much of a single issue to Detroit and its fair. “It is a beautiful city,” the journal’s correspondent noted, “strong in resources, full of life, and rich with opportunity.”

Detroit in 1889 was still seven years away from having the first automobile appear on its streets, and a full decade away from the opening of its first auto factory. As a result, industry in the future Motor City was more diversified during this period than at any other stage in its long history. Hundreds of companies, large and small, produced shoes, stoves, varnishes, paints, drugs, cigars, patent medicines, boats, hoopskirts, railroad cars, steel rails, brass fittings, soap, and seeds for local consumption and export.

In the process of flexing its muscles, Detroit “had lost most of its small-town characteristics and had become a real city, big and bustling,” historian Arthur M. Woodford would later write. The population had nearly doubled in a decade to 206,000 people, making it the 15th largest city in the country.

Development had pushed north, east, and west from lower Woodward Avenue, with the new residential sections “planted in what only a short time before had been corn fields and wood lots. Huge elm, maple, and chestnut trees shaded the streets, and gracious homes, most of them frame and painted either white or dark green, gave the new residential areas an air of comfort and well-being.” The streets were paved with cobblestones and cedar blocks and the sidewalks were made of wood. The widespread use of electricity was literally just around the corner — garish 125-foot towers illuminated intersections throughout the city — but for now, homes and businesses still used gaslight and trolleys were drawn by horses. Major symbols of progress — a new art museum, the city’s first skyscraper, a second train depot — had either just opened or were under way.

For years, Detroiters of means and influence had been talking of holding a permanent annual event on a much grander scale than the Michigan State Fair, which rotated among various cities. Their imaginations had been stoked by the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, the country’s first official world’s fair. The idea of marrying an agricultural fair to an industrial exposition seemed to make sense. By the middle 1880s, thanks principally to the unflagging efforts of local merchant Eber Cottrell, enough of Detroit’s movers and shakers had signed on to the dream to make it an actuality. By early 1889, the exposition company had a capital stock of $500,000 to draw on. The goal was not only to showcase the products of the city and the state, but also to draw attention to Detroit and boost its stature among other great cities.

The president of the exposition company was U.S. Sen. James McMillan, who had made his fortune manufacturing railroad cars. Other notables among the 100-plus stockholders were ex-governor Russell Alger, a Civil War general who’d also grown rich off rolling stock; Thomas W. Palmer, a former U.S. senator who was appointed minister to Spain in early 1889; and Dexter M. Ferry, who operated the largest catalog seed company in the country.

Disdaining sky-high real-estate prices in the growing city, officers of the enterprise bought 72 acres of unincorporated land at the juncture of the Detroit and Rouge Rivers, just south of Fort Wayne and about 1,000 yards beyond Detroit’s western boundary. The bucolic area, valued at $150,000, had long been enjoyed by canoeists, fishermen, and hunters. C.W. Robinson, known as “a cultivated, well-informed gentleman of liberal tastes,” was hired as general manager, based on his experience with several New York fairs. By the time the exposition ended, he would be described as being in a state of near collapse.

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