Visiting the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in July 1893: A Personal View

Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time the question whether the American people knew where they were driving. Adams answered, for one, that he did not know, but would try to find out. On reflecting sufficiently deeply, under the shadow of Richard Hunt's architecture, he decided that the American people probably knew no more than he did; but that they might still be driving or drifting unconsciously to some point in thought, as their solar system was said to be drifting towards some point in space; and that, possibly, if relations could be observed, this point might be fixed. Chicago was the first expression of American thought as a unity; one must start there. (Adams 343) So wrote preeminent American historian Henry Adams about his experiences at the World's Columbian Exposition held at Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. While Adams, both intellectually and socially, represented "high culture" in Victorian America, other voices, less eloquent and less elegant, have also drifted across a century's time into our consciousness, voices whose authenticity and clarity provide resonance and definition to the more abstract symbolic treatments of the exposition offered in the late nineteenth century by representatives of the American intelligentsia. One such voice, the voice of an "ordinary" visitor to the Columbian Exposition, is expressed in a recently discovered letter written at and about the world's fair held in 1893 at Chicago's Jackson Park. The letter, which recounts a typical day in mid July at America's greatest international exposition, has resurfaced, more than a century after the event it describes, at a collectible shop in Berkeley, California. It is written on both sides of three 7-7/8 by 5-3/4 inch pages, each page headed with the official seal of the state of Pennsylvania accompanied by the words "Pennsylvania Office of The Board of World's Fair Managers. Harrisburg." No envelope accompanied the letter and, thus, one might have been left to guess who the "Annie" was that visited the exposition, who the "Bertha" was to whom her letter was addressed, and in what part of the United States either writer or recipient lived. We might have had to content ourselves with the general knowledge that Annie was one of the over twenty-one million admissions to the fair, the majority of whom were from the Mississippi Valley region, that she attended the fair with one or more friends (no husband or relative is mentioned), that she was a young, probably unmarried woman, perhaps in her twenties, and that her letter was likely one of a series that she wrote to "Bertha" describing daily experiences at the wondrous "White City" on the west bank of Lake Michigan in south Chicago. However, by several strokes of luck, Annie's niece is still alive, resides in the San Francisco Bay Area (where the writer of the current article teaches), and, once contacted, was able to provide some interesting biographical details about her aunt. The letter's author was Annie Finette Lynch and its recipient, Bertha, was her younger sister, Bertha Whitney Lynch. Both were born and, at the time of the exposition, lived in Philadelphia. The father of the Lynch sisters worked as a clerk at several businesses in the Philadelphia area and the family considered itself "middle class." Annie, born in 1866, was a high school graduate and was considered by her sister and niece as "a very bright" young woman. At the time she visited the Columbian Exposition, Annie was 27 years old and unmarried, nor did she ever marry, supporting herself in later years on a family inheritance. She traveled to the fair with a friend and one, possibly two, of her aunts. Though explicit and implicit evidence appears in the letter to suggest that her correspondence with Bertha was one of a series of more or less daily reports of exposition experiences during a one to two week period in Chicago (there is written a Roman numeral VI in the upper right corner of page one), neither her niece nor other family members recall seeing any other letters written by Annie during her visit to the fair. …