In all 190 acres of ground were occupied. The total receipts were $1,087,227, and the expenditures balanced to a cent. A unique expense feature was that, excluding the preliminary work, the women raised the money and paid the entire running cost of the Woman’s Department. The turnstiles registered 1,886,714 entrances.
This exposition was succeeded in 1898 by the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition at Omaha, an undertaking designed to show what had been accomplished by the pioneers and their children in the great Trans-Mississippi Valley, and especially in a State that forty-three years before was an unorganized territory in the vast tract known as the Louisiana Purchase. The site was a plateau just north of the city, and in planning the display every consideration was given to originality. Excepting that the grounds constituted a second White City, from the use of “staff,” as at Chicago, every feature of design and construction possessed striking elements of difference from all similar efforts in the past.
The management was under the presidency of Gurdon W. Wattles, and the exposition was formally opened by President McKinley, who, in the White House at Washington, pressed an electric button that started the great engine. The United States Government erected a building of the classic style, following the Ionic order. It was surmounted by a colossal dome supporting a copy of Bartholdi’s statue of “Liberty Enlightening the World,” and had a floor space for exhibits of about 50,000 square feet. The Government also recognized the importance of the event by issuing a special set of commemorative postage stamps. Fine arts was exhibited in a twin-domed building, a structure in two parts, with an elaborate peristyle between them, and all under one great roof.
What afforded the masses the greatest delight were the ethnological exhibits and the instructive and amusing scenes on the Midway Reserve. These included an Indian village, with representatives from every tribe between Alaska and Florida, a Chinese village, an Arabian encampment, a Moorish town, a Swiss village, a Cairo street, the entertaining Egyptian Pyramid, and the gigantic passenger-carrying Sherman Umbrella—a mechanical marvel operated by electricity, and one hundred feet higher than the Ferris Wheel of Chicago. There was also a picturesque lagoon or canal, half a mile long and 150 feet wide at its narrowest part, terminating in an artificial lake trefoil in shape and 400 feet across.
The exposition was opened on June 1 and was closed on October 31. In that time it was visited by more than 2,600,000 people, the largest single-day attendance being 98,785. The total receipts were not quite $2,000,000, and the expenditures were about $1,500,000.
MAIN BUILDING, NATIONAL EXPORT EXPOSITION, PHILADELPHIA, SEPT. 14 TO NOV. 30, 1899.
This completes the record of the most notable expositions and the incidental history of their development, from the commercial fair of the previous century up to near the close of 1899.
There remains to note a form of permanent exhibition that has been purposely reserved for this point. The Commercial Museum, of which Philadelphia has the two most effective examples in existence, is a purely commercial development, yet an educational text-book of unique and extraordinary compass. Though the Philadelphia Commercial Museum and the similar department of the Philadelphia Bourse were both projected before the foreign trade of the United States had reached the enormous volume that caused wonder and alarm alike all over the world, both have had a powerful, direct, and immediate influence in bringing about a greater appreciation abroad of American products.
The commercial museums stand between the American producer and the foreign factor. They inform the former where special articles are needed and the latter of reputable firms who can supply their needs. By a large corps of traveling agents, an enormous correspondence, and a direct coöperation with the State Department and its representatives, these museums keep in the closest possible touch with the commercial interests of the world. All this is independent of the exhibition feature, a vast department in which the principal economic productions, first of the United States and then correspondingly of the world, are spread before the eye of the visitor. In this connection should also be noted the fact that many of our commercial representatives abroad have established at their headquarters collections of American products that are particularly needed in their respective localities.