Portland staged its first and only world's fair from June 1 through October 15, 1905. During those four and a half months, 1,588,000 paying visitors passed through the gates to the 400-acre fairgrounds that overlooked Guild's Lake on the northwest edge of town. More than 400,000 were from outside the Pacific Northwest, a huge number of tourists for a city of perhaps 120,000 people.

Two years of landscaping turned a marshy slough surrounded by dairies and truck farms into building sites and terraces leading to a sparking lake kept fresh with a constant flow of water pumped from the Willamette. The exhibition halls had gone up on the bluff overlooking Guild's Lake and on a peninsula accessed by the Bridge of Nations. The whole ensemble of whitewashed buildings against the green hills, said Mayor George H. Williams, was like "a diamond set in a coronet of emeralds."

Portland put on the Lewis and Clark Exposition to show that it could mount a major civic enterprise and pull it off. Portland had a solid record of economic growth since its founding in 1845, but it was competing for investment and immigration with dozens of other cities throughout the American West-with nearby Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, Bellingham, and Everett and with more distant places like Denver, Oakland, and San Diego. A successful world's fair could do wonders for the city's reputation as a safe and sound place to do business.

Portlanders also had an extra incentive. Their event came only one year after St. Louis put on the enormously successful Louisiana Purchase Exposition. St. Louis was one of the most important cities in the country, and a fair that held its own with the Missouri metropolis would do wonders for Portland's reputation.

The Exposition was also expected to be a direct boost to the regional economy. Visitors would spend money on train tickets, hotel rooms, food, and drink (the Northern Pacific Railroad and brewer Henry Weinhard were among the biggest financial backers). They would also learn about the natural resources of the Northwest and realize how close Portland was to the markets of East Asia, which were attracting new attention after the recent U.S. acquisition of Hawaii and the Philippines. Although few ever used it, the full official name was Lewis and Clark Centennial and American Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair.

Like all of the expositions during the great century of world's fairs (from the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851 to the New York and San Francisco world's fairs of 1939-40), the Lewis and Clark Exposition was a showcase for progress. In the era before television and websites, people came to world's fairs to learn about scientific and technological advances. In Portland they could take in moving picture shows, watch motorized blimps maneuver in the sky, cheer the winner of the first transcontinental auto race, and marvel of the power of electric lighting.

Technological progress seemed simple, but social progress was more complex. A deeply racist exhibit of Filipino "savages" along the fair's amusement trail contrasted with the forward-looking speeches at the American Woman Suffrage Association convention. The official program for Portland Day showed a lonely Indian looking down from the hills at the fairgrounds, a reminder of the power of European Americans to push aside other peoples.

A visitor who wandered through the exhibition pavilions saw the themes of prosperity and progress in multiple variations. The Oriental Exhibits and Foreign Exhibits pavilions highlighted the possibilities of foreign trade; Japan's million dollar exhibit was the largest among the twenty-one participating nations. The Palace of Agriculture showed the bounty of the western land. So did the Oregon Building, where individual counties showed off grain, fruit, canned good, minerals, and myrtle wood furniture. The towering Forestry Building, a "log cathedral" made from huge unpeeled Douglas fir trunks, was testimony to the potential of the northwest lumber industry. Separate buildings for Manufacturing and for Electricity, Machinery and Transportation displayed the latest products of technical ingenuity.

The U.S. Government Building summarized both themes. Naval displays were a reminder that the United States was now a Pacific military power. A working model of the new Palouse irrigation project in eastern Washington, a relief model of the Klamath Basin reclamation project in southern Oregon, and a fish hatchery showed how engineering and science were enhancing regional growth. Panoramas of the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone Falls looked forward to the expansion of western tourism.

Portland's leaders hoped that the Lewis and Clark Exposition would garner reams of attention favorable publicity (a city's modern equivalent would be securing the Olympic Games). When they emblazoned "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" on the arch over the entrance gate, they hoped that visitors would decide that empire was actually taking its way westward to Oregon.

They had reason to be pleased. Journalists from the East Coast called the Exposition "Portland's pride" and commented that "the whole fair is a successful effort to express . . . the natural richness of the country and its relative nearness to Asia."  The noted editor Walter Hines Page wrote that "the enterprise has from the beginning been managed with modesty, good sense, and good taste."

The fair coincided with a surge of expansion of northwestern agriculture and logging. Portland grew from 90,000 residents in 1900 to 274,000 in 1916 and began to build much of the downtown that we still use today.  Former Vice President Charles Fairbanks marveled over the new skyscrapers and told a reporter in 1913 that "no place I know of has made such remarkable development and progress."

Carl Abbott
Carl Abbott has taught at Portland State University since 1978. He has written extensively on the history of Portland and the Pacific Northwest and has been active as a board member of a number of community groups, including the Historic Preservation League of Oregon, the Oregon Downtown Development Association, and Livable Oregon. He is a contributor to the Oregonian and Portland Monthly and a frequent speaker to community groups.

Sources

Abbott, Carl. The Great Extravaganza: Portland's Lewis and Clark Exposition. 3rd ed.: Portland, 2004.

Blee, Lisa. “Completing Lewis and Clark’s Westward March: Exhibiting a History of Empire at the 1905 Portland World’s Fair.� Oregon Historcial Quarterly, 106, Summer 2005.

McMath, George. "The Lewis and Clark Fair," in Thomas Vaughan and Virginia Ferriday, eds., Space, Style, and Structure: Building in Northwest America. Portland, 1974.

Rydell, Robert. All the World's a Fair. Chicago, 1984.