Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 August 1894 — PASSING OF THE FAIR. [ARTICLE]

PASSING OF THE FAIR.

The almost total destruction of the White City by fire on the sth inst., will be regarded as a personal loss by thousands of people throughout the United States, who had still cherished a hope that at least the Court of Honor might be restored and spared for many years to serve as a souvenir of the glories past and gone. With this conflagration has passed the last hope of such a consummation. All lovers of the beautiful can but feel that the world has sustained an irreparable loss, and will fully appreciate the following somewhat effusive description of the catastrophe, sent out by the Associated Press, which, however, much much opinions may differ as to its propriety in telegraphic dispatches, is wot overdrawn or inappropriate to the ending of the famous structures described. The magnitude of the casualty, the swift destruction of the dream of beauty that still lingered by the lake side for the incendiaries torch to dissolve, the final and total disappearance of the tangible glories that are today no more, are well told and we give it place as a fine specimen of descriptive writing that we believe our readers will fully appreciate: “The World’s Columbian Exposition is a billowy sea of white ashes, calcined staff and twisted steel girders. The stately Administration Building, the architectural crown of the White City, with its gilded and decorated dome, its supporting pavilions, enriched with statuary; the majestic Agricultural Building, with its tinted and decorated collonades, its beautiful statues of abundance, its zodiacal circles upheld on the arms of female figures, representing the races of man, and its flattened dome surrounded by a decoration of turkey cocks with spreading tails, above which once wheeled St. Gauden’s beautiful figure of Diana, the chaste, the beautiful palace of mechanical arts, with its lofty fluted Corinthian collonades, its superb circular-porched entrance, and its figure-tipped spires, the light and airy electricity building, with its open roof-lanterns, its curvilinear recessed entrance, where erstwhile stood the statue of Benjamin Franklin on the south, and its graceful projecting bSys on the north; the attractively inornate, but substantial looking mines building,the mammoth manufacturers and liberal

arts building, with res towering arches of steel inclosing a forty-acre lot and its lofty and triumphal corner and central arches, together with a number of minor structures have passed into history at the wave of an incendiary’s hand. From south collonade to the government building and from the lake to the golden door of the angel-guarded transportation building, the world-famous white city is no more. As the evening sun was shedding his level rays for the last time on the erstwhile scene of life, movement and color -they felFupon the familiar outlines of these flowers of human handiwork almost untouched in their serene loveliness. Two hours later the new moon bent her pale crescent above them shining on a mass of ruins, wrapped in a pall of smoke, save where the yellow-red of blazing timbers flared against the blue-blaek which covers the site of the white city and covers us all. Qf all th« great departmental structures the; fire spared only the transportation building, horticultural hall, the fish-, eries building and the art palace. The last named is now occupied by the Field Columbian museum and the fisheries building is a mere steel skeleton, having been demolished by a wrecking company. Besides these the government building, the woman’s building, the British and German and a few of the State buildings are all that remain of the hundreds of structures which once filled Jackson Park.”