1905

1905

Previous Day	1904-12
Next Day	1906

Below is a list of events that happened during 1905.

Events

• The Maine State Building was moved to Point Lookout, MO near Branson (probably in 1905) as a Hunting & Fishing club. In 1907, it became part of College of the Ozark. Unfortunately, it burned in 1930 & was eventually replaced by the school's new chapel.

January, 1905

• End of lease of Washington University campus buildings. Fair officials & personnel move out.

January 1, 1905

• Leased Washington University buildings emptied and returned to Washington University for spring semester. [doubtful this all happened on New Years Day but is perhaps a generalization of when events began]

January 8, 1905

• Large snowfall & St, Louisans sled down Art Hill after Fair was over. Fair Administration Office employees used folding chairs successfully. Jessie Tarbox Beals was one of those participating in the fun.

January 24, 1905:

• Palace of Forestry, Fish, and Game was ready for transfer to Chicago House Wrecking Co., the company which had purchased the Exposition company's property.

January 27, 1905

• The special detail of regular army guards assigned upon request for special protection and which had been serving since the close of the Exposition was withdrawn, leaving the greatly reduced staff of the Jefferson Guard to continue serving.

January 31, 1905

• Lieutenant-Colonel Samuel W. Fountain served as Jefferson Guard commandant from September 30, 1904 till the guard was mustered out on this day. The Jefferson Guard was then disbanded the next day, February 1, 1905. The entire staff of the commandant was made up of officers detailed from the regular army.

February, 1905

• Washington University staff & personnel move into campus buildings after Louisiana Purchase Exposition Co. lease ends.
• Fair buildings evacuated.
• Fair buildings started to be demolished or moved.
  • Utah State Building moved to Nashville & Childress Avenues.
  • Sweden Pavilion moved to Lindsborg, KS, still in use.

February 1, 1905

• The Jefferson Guard, a component of the United States Army, was disbanded and replaced by shifts of private watchmen. The Guard had provided police services for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Co. starting June 1, 1902.
• Palace of Electricity was ready for transfer to Chicago House Wrecking Co., the company which had purchased the Exposition company's property.
• Palace of Machinery was transferred to the Director of Works and practically all exhibits except those of extraordinary dimensions had been removed at that time.

February 15, 1905

• Palace of Transportation was ready for transfer to Chicago House Wrecking Co., the company which had purchased the Exposition company's property.

February 28, 1905

• Remaining exhibit palaces were practically cleared.

March 1, 1905

• Remaining exhibit palaces were transferred to the President of the Exposition company with such exhibits as they still contained jurisdiction of the Division of Exhibits over all exhibit palaces ceasing on that date.

August 20, 1905

• STL Post-Dispatch publishes article entitled, "How They Wrecked the World's Fair", a comprehensive and detailed discussion of the current state of affairs in Forest Park - the destruction, the conditions, the financials, and the prevailing perspectives locally:
  • Chicago House Wrecking Co. paid $450,000 for (allegedly $50,000,000) exposition, Palace of Manufactures bought for $800,000 alone,
  • Exposition Bank being used for a blacksmith shop, a busy blacksmith plies his trade while the stands from which you got your 50-cent coin before entering Fairgrounds are now occupied by the time keepers,
  • Mrs. Rorer's cafe in East Restaurant Pavilion being dismantled,
  • 180 men on timekeeper's sheet tearing down Palace of Electricity,
  • reported 100,000,000 feet of lumber available for recycle; Chicago fair had 80,000,000, Buffalo 33,000,000, Omaha 15,000,000,
  • enough wrought iron pipe to wrap around the earth 9 1/2 times,
  • 10,000 cars of staff & plaster
  • 20 train cars of nail heads pulled off timber after outside boards pulled away,
  • Ohio State Building bought for $600, originally cost $175,000,
  • $100,000 German Pavilion bought for $600.
  • wreckers paying out $35-40K every 2 weeks on payroll,
  • Pike, state bldgs, foreign section (except Brazil), Palaces of Agriculture, Horticulture and Forestry, Fish & Game, Barracks, Philippine Reservation, Stock Barns, all hotels, & most restaurants are gone,
  • long list of special bldgs (Indian School, San Francisco Building, Jerusalem, House of Hoo-Hoo, & others) are gone,
  • Intramural Railway has been torn up, stations demolished.
  • working on all palaces except Machinery & Liberal Arts. These two still stand.
  • US Gov't Building also intact because Gov't chose to dispose of it by sealed bids & time it should become a part of the general wreck was delayed,
  • Palace of Fine Art remains as a permanent STL Art Museum,
  • Not much work done on power house, wrecking company maintains it for fire protection and keeps up steam on the high pressure engine ready to get direct service on any fire that starts,
  • visitors can view grounds, wander at leisure on outskirts of ruins but it is not safe to enter any bldgs. Staff and timbers are being pried loose on all sides & they may become victim of falling masses,
  • Palace of Manufactures wreck is most apparent, bldg is only partly gone & bare lumber lies about,
  • Palace of Agriculture is only barren desolation. [AMAZING CONSIDERING HOW HUGE IT WAS!]
  • 1400 men work on bldgs but not as many as wrecking co. would hire if more could be secured. STL & Eastern paper advertisements for men appear constantly.
  • Pay is $1.50 to $3.50 a day, according to character of work, skill displayed by workman, height at which he is employed & other conditions.
  • Some bosses have been with Mr. Bennett, wrecking co. Gen. Superintendent, since Chicago WF while many have been with him several years. These constitute the gang of workmen, many old hands at the business,
  • Men are being taken on and laid off constantly. Many are drifting, semi-hobo class, who only work a few days, some not more than a day, some only a few hours.
  • 100-300 men change every day.
  • If you want to work you can any day by calling before 7 o'clock a.m. at wrecking company offices in bldg used by express company during Fair, just inside Olive St. entrance,
  • Over in the little waiting room at the head of Machinery Gardens, between Palaces of Transportation & that of Machiinery, an Italian woman has possession and some of the workmen eat there,
  • On every hand are statues and groups of statuary in ruins, here a figure without a head, there one with a leg gone and another with a yawning hole caved in its back.
  • Bridges are falling in decay, the cement floors cracking, the staff cracking and crumbling off the statuary and figureheads,
  • Louisiana Purchase Monument still stands at head of STL Plaza but there are holes in it and it is dirty and weather stained. "We're selling statuary cheap for cash these days", so they say,
  • 50 or 60 cars of stuff are being shipped out daily, consisting of everything conceivable.
  • 119-page catalog of mat'l for sale beginning with spec's of lumber ending with list of wire cots, including e.g. Aerial truck, bags, cabin satchels, daters, ears, galvanized pipe, hair pillows, iceboxes, jackscrews, Kelly rollers, ladders,
  • Company estimates there will be 20,000 cars of stuff,
  • 10,000 cars of this will be staff. The staff is being made into wall plaster principally,
  • There will be 50 or more cars of sashes and doors and fifty cars more of prepared roofing,
  • Nails, to be sold for scrap, will constitute twenty or twenty-five cars,
  • Everything is being saved, most of it is being shipped to Chicago to the wrecking company's yards, but a great deal is sold direct from the grounds or shipped to the purchaser from there,
  • Most important single piece of wreckage, probably, from the wrecking company's point of view, is 3,000,000 pounds of copper wire. It alone cost LPEC $900,000 and much of it good as new, practically speaking,
  • Many other electrical supplies are among the salvage, 1 item being that of roughly over 1M electric light bulbs. 200K of these were used in Palace of Electricity. 150K never used at all and are a pick-up for wrecking co,
  • Lumber, possibly, will bring more revenue than this wire, possibly not, depending on condition of the lumber when the wreck is finally cleared away,
  • 11M feet of lumber were saved from Palace of Agricultural, largest of the exhibition palaces, while Horticulture yielded 3M of marketable stuff. Several of those still standing are larger than Horticulture, however,
  • Nearly 1000 carloads of sewer pipe have been recovered from the ground and cleaned and sorted,
  • Practically all the Intramural Railroad material has been sold to interurban trolley lines, some of the salvage being 45 miles of rails. 100,000 ties, 3000 telegraph poles and 400 tons of spikes,
  • LPEC has a force of men at work in the State section restoring the park, urging wreckers off the main portion of Fairgrounds that they may begin restoration work there,
  • Re: completing the work... "That, is a leading question." said Supt. Bennet when asked. "We expect to finish by the first of the year, or by February of next year. We took the contract to get out in a year, but that was only approximate. After the end of a year our time was to be specified by an arbitration committee. It was impossible, you see, to even approximate at all correctly the time it would take for us to get the grounds cleared. You remember that the Exposition Company had to have an extra year for building it. For that reason we agreed on a year with the condition that the time should be again settled on at the end of the year. An instance of the uncertainty of conditions governing our work was shown right at the start. We took possession last December. It was March or April of this year before the exhibitors got out of the buildings. We were not responsible for that loss of time, of course. On the other hand, you may be sure that we will not spend a day more here than is absolutely necessary. We have a more direct interest in seeing this wreck cleared away than has any one else -- it is costing us several thousand dollars every day we are here and every week we cut off means a small fortune to us. No penalty attaches to our failure to get the work cleaned up in a year, or in any specified length of time."
  • Supt. Bennett expresses the opinion Forest Park will be prettier when the Exposition management finally leaves it than it was before ground was broken for the World's Fair.