Encouraged by the results of his initial efforts, he went to Boston to solicit pecuniary aid for a second and much larger exhibition. Although he was at that time widely known for his public-spirited philanthropy, and also as the founder of the influential Berkshire Agricultural Society, his appeals for aid brought him little save derision. To show how small concern was felt by business and public men toward the farming industry, a sentence in a letter from ex-President John Adams to Mr. Watson is sufficient:—
“You will get no aid from Boston; commerce, literature, theology, medicine, the university, and universal politics are against you.”
The ex-President was correct in his judgment. Mr. Watson did not receive a single favorable response to his appeals; yet he lost not a particle of faith in the wisdom of his undertaking. With the coöperation only of the farmers in his county, Mr. Watson succeeded in arranging annual exhibitions until 1816, when he returned to Albany. The same year he organized the first agricultural society in the State of New York, and began establishing fairs and cattle shows in the near-by counties. In 1819 he secured the passage of an Act by the Legislature appropriating $10,000 annually for six years for the promotion of agriculture and domestic manufactures, conditional on a like amount being raised by the agricultural societies in the different counties. A State Society was incorporated in 1832, to which county societies were directed to report, while it, in turn, had to render a combined report to the Legislature annually.
Since then an agricultural department has become an indispensable part of the government of the various States and Territories, even of those that are popularly believed to be only metallic producers. The character of the state and county agricultural fair has been undergoing a radical change for many years, especially in sections thickly settled or near large cities, and the chief attractions have passed from the exhibition of sleek domestic animals and choice fruits of the soil to horse-racing and bicycle contests. Innovations foreign to the spirit and intention of the fair have already wrought its ruin in many places and are threatening it generally.
Of American fairs in the original commercial sense, those held during the Civil War, to aid the work of the United States Sanitary Commission on the battlefield and in the camp and hospital, will always be historically conspicuous. During those memorable four years it is doubtful if there was a single city, town, or village in the Northern States that did not put forth a special effort to provide necessities and conveniences for the soldiers and sailors that were not supplied by the government, and the fair was the most popular form of raising the needful money.
Exhibitions of special articles, possessing the features of state, national, and international combinations, and independent of any locality, event, or period of time, are growing in frequency. Many of these have a predominating technical interest,—as the international exhibitions of fisheries and fishery methods, of life-saving methods and apparatus, of forestry products and systems of forest preservation, and of railway appliances; while others combine the technical and popular features, as the exhibitions of electrical apparatus, of improved food preparations, of bicycles, of automobile vehicles, and of wood-working and labor-saving machinery.
Special exhibitions in the United States that possess a large popular interest include the annual showing of the art associations and leagues in the principal cities, and the annual horse, dog, and sportsmen’s shows in New York city. Among them also are to be noted the permanent expositions in Philadelphia and Chicago—both reminders of the greatest international expositions that had been held up to their day. The Philadelphia exposition is held in Memorial Hall, the building erected in Fairmount Park by the State of Pennsylvania at a cost of $1,500,000, and used for the Art Gallery of the Centennial Exposition in 1876. It now contains an art and industrial collection similar to the famous South Kensington Museum in London. The Chicago exposition is in the former Art Palace of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and, having been endowed by Marshall Field with $1,000,000, is now known as the Field Columbian Museum. Its most conspicuous feature is a collection showing the development of the railway, and the next, its forestry exhibits. In the line of permanent expositions, Philadelphia is to be credited with two commercial museums of far-reaching influence that will be considered further on.
EIFFEL TOWER. PARIS EXPOSITION, 1888.