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The History of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition

Officially known as the “International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine,” the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 was the first major world’s fair to be held in the United States. The Centennial celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and showcased the United States as a rapidly developing industrial power with abundant natural resources. Nearly 10 million people visited the Centennial from May 10 to November 10, 1876, a staggering feat of cultural tourism when one considers the U.S. population totaled just 40 million at the time.

“What happened in Philadelphia in 1876 is a story we need to know,” says Nancy Kolb, president & CEO of Please Touch Museum. It was an opportunity for the city to shine and it did. It was America’s explosion onto the world scene.”

The Civil War had ended 11 years earlier, but the nation’s wounds were still fresh. Political scandals were in the headlines and women were sowing the seeds of the fight for equality. New inventions were being introduced left and right. The manufacturing of goods was booming. The United States of America was 100 years old. The country needed a party… a big one that could highlight the best and brightest of American (and international) ingenuity.

The Centennial was the product of ten years of planning and hard work, and the results were astonishing. Some 30,000 exhibits filled over 240 massive exhibit halls spread over 284 acres in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. Nearly every nation in the world exhibited at the fair.

Presiding at the opening ceremonies on May 10, 1876 were President Ulysses S. Grant, his cabinet, the Supreme Court, both houses of Congress, Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil and his Empress, the governors of Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, and more than 100,000 spectators. During the opening ceremonies Richard Wagner's “Centennial Grand March,” John Greenleaf Whittier's “Centennial Hymn,” and Sidney Lanier's “Centennial Cantata” were played and sung. At noon, after an address by the President, the Centennial Exhibition was opened amid a resounding artillery salute of 100 guns.

An anchor of the exhibition was a massive Corliss steam engine, the largest such engine ever built, weighing 650 tons, standing nearly 70 feet in height, and providing the power for all the machines in the exhibition's Machinery Hall. The huge Corliss engine found a home in Chicago after 1876, where for 30 years, it powered George Pullman's train-car factory. Once retired, the giant machine was sold as scrap for $8 a ton. Another popular exhibit in Machinery Hall was a prototype slice of the cable that Roebling Brothers would use for the Brooklyn Bridge. Among the other technologies on display was a new device patented by a Scottish immigrant named Alexander Graham Bell. Called the “telephone,” it allowed people to speak at a distance, connected by a wire.

Exhibits were classified into seven departments: mining and metallurgy, manufactures, education and science, machinery, agriculture, art, and horticulture. These departments were housed in the five major buildings of the Exhibition. The Main Exhibition Building contained the exhibits relating to manufactures, mining and metallurgy, and science and education, while each of the other four departments had its own building.

Designed in the magnificent Beaux Arts style, Memorial Hall served as the Art Gallery at the Centennial and was designed to serve as a permanent museum of art for the city of Philadelphia. During the Centennial, 3,256 paintings and drawings, 627 works of sculpture, 431 works of applied art and nearly 3,000 groups of photographs from 20 nations were exhibited. On display was Peter Rothermel's huge 32 x 16 ¾ -foot painting Battle of Gettysburg, which can now be seen at The State Museum in Harrisburg. Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins displayed several works of art in Memorial Hall, including the paintings The Chess Players (now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Portrait of Professor Benjamin Howard Rand, and the watercolor Baseball Players Practicing. But the painting that he called, “far better than anything I have ever done” was rejected as being “too violent and bloody” and was relegated to be displayed among the Army medical exhibits. That painting, The Gross Clinic, would ignite a firestorm in Philadelphia in late 2006, as civic leaders called it “Philadelphia’s greatest painting” and fought to keep it from being sold to a museum outside the city.

The Women's Pavilion, erected by the Women's Centennial Committee led by Mrs. Elizabeth Duane Gillespie, energetic great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin, was an innovation for an exposition, the first large-scale attempt to exhibit the products of feminine industry and taste. It showed the relative emancipation of the women of the United States, while it bombarded visitors with feminist and women’s rights propaganda in its weekly newspaper, The New Century for Woman.

After a six month run, the Expo closed its doors, having played host to nearly 10 million visitors. On November 10, 1876, President Grant returned to Fairmount Park to close the great fair. Most of the buildings were removed from Fairmount Park and the exhibits they had held would go on to form the cornerstones of the collections of some of the nation’s top museums. The Smithsonian Institution acquired the exhibits of 34 countries and a number of U.S. states, which were shipped to Washington, D.C., in more than 40 freight cars. Congress provided a new home for the exhibits, first, by transferring the Washington Armory to the Smithsonian, which used the huge building to store the exhibits, then by constructing the National Museum.

On May 10, 1877, exactly one year after the inauguration of the Centennial Exposition, Memorial Hall reopened as the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art (later renamed the Philadelphia Museum of Art). The museum was chartered with a goal of establishing "a Museum of Art, in all its branches and technical application, and with a special view to the development of the art and textile industries of the state." By the turn of the century, however, it became increasingly apparent that larger quarters were needed to house the growing collections, and the museum moved to its new building on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in 1928.

Memorial Hall remained open for smaller exhibits and was used for collections storage until 1956, when it was converted to a recreation center and headquarters for Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park Commission. In 1961, a basketball court was inserted in the west gallery, and locker rooms were built on the ground floor. In 1962, the east gallery was converted into an indoor swimming pool. By 2000, the building’s deteriorating condition led the Park Commission to seek a new tenant to restore Memorial Hall. Please Touch Museum signed an 80-year lease on February 14, 2005.

During renovations, one of Philadelphia’s lost treasures has been protected in a temporary, climate-controlled room on the ground floor. In the mid 1880s, John Baird—a former member of the Centennial Board of Finance—started the ambitious project to record the history of the Centennial in miniature. Months of archival research and preparatory drafting led to the hiring of highly skilled mechanics to construct, carve and paint the buildings and other objects depicted in 1 to 192 scale. It was first exhibited in 1889 at the Spring Garden Institute and later gifted by Baird to the City of Philadelphia. It was on display in City Hall from 1890-1894 and put in storage until 1901. That year, it was moved to the basement of Memorial Hall, where it sits today. The Centennial Model is the centerpiece of the Centennial Experience at Please Touch Museum. Appropriate educational activities and exhibits featuring original artifacts, reproductions, stories and “touchable” objects will surround the model in its room, providing visitors with a complete Centennial experience.

In 2005, a coalition of organizations in Fairmount Park created a master plan for the future of the fairgrounds, dubbed the “Centennial District.”  The Fairmount Park Commission, Fairmount Park Conservancy, Please Touch Museum, Philadelphia Zoo and Mann Center for the Performing Arts devised a 20-year plan to turn the area into a cultural and historical attraction.  The Centennial District Master Plan envisions the transformation and revitalization of the area. It includes proposals for land use, transportation, signage and community development.  It is an ambitious, multi-faceted, 20-year plan with an end date of 2026 - targeted to coincide with the 250th anniversary of American Independence. The Master Plan also examines the connections from the Centennial District to the surrounding neighborhoods and to the greater Philadelphia region.