Bicentennial Mall: Centennial Exposition

Picture from TN.gov website on the exposition.

In 1897 Tennessee celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the state's admission to the Union with the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition.  Many Tennessee cities contributed pavilions as well as several international contributions.  Along the Bicentennial Mall in Nashville is a memorial to the exposition.

It includes a circle of stone engraved with different messages from the exposition and is surrounded by various stones engraved with information about the exposition.

Interestingly I read that President McKinley officially opened the festivities from Washington D.C.:

At twelve noon on May 1, 1897, President William McKinley officially opened the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in Nashville.  While the president would not visit the Exposition until the next month, organizers of the event arranged for him to press an electric button in the White House that sparked equipment at the fair’s Machinery Building.  Thus began a half-year of joyous opportunity for the state’s citizens to commemorate the past hundred years of Tennessee’s achievements and history.

To learn more about the event check out this website which also includes many pictures.


The pictures of the stone are a bit slanted because I was trying to get the words in the shot without having boring pictures that were all straight lines at right angles with the ground, ;-).

It is interesting to see how many things that we think of as normal in today's world started at international expositions (like the Eiffel Tower, Ferris Wheels, and so much more).

Vanity Fair contained a diverse arrangement of the exotic and the mundane: the Cuban Village sat near a Nebraska sod house, the “Old Plantation” sat across from a reproduction of the Alhambra, and a living Chinese village was established next to the Gettysburg Cyclorama.

 I have seen the Parthenon several times while in Nashville and I wondered about it quite frequently.  I'm sure that I'd heard before that the city was called the Athens of the South, but it wasn't until this visit to the Bicentennial Mall that I realized that it was a reconstructed building from the exposition.

Construction style for the primary structures imitated the buildings of Chicago’s “White City,” the nickname given to the fairgrounds of the 1893 fair.  Buildings exaggerated the standard elements of Classical design, with grand pediments, deep entablatures, columns capped by various orders of capitals, and fine rows of arched windows.

Different cities and states provided individual buildings.  The most popular of these was perhaps the Fine Arts building, a full-scale reproduction of the Parthenon in Athens.  In 1897, Nashville had already acquired its nickname “The Athens of the South,” so the building epitomized the city’s classical ideals.  Following the Victorian custom of the day, it was crammed with sculpture, paintings, and watercolors, for a total of 1,175 art objects....Another large and beautiful building—the United States government Report on the Centennial Exposition refers to it as “perhaps the most beautiful on the ground”—served as a forum and exhibition space for African American history and culture.  The Negro Building told “the story of achievement under obstacles often seemingly impossible to overcome.”

A total of 1,786,714 people attended the six-month celebration in Nashville—far fewer than attended the Chicago Fair or the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.  Officials had originally hoped that 2,000,000 people would visit the fair.  One explanation for this minor shortfall was that a yellow fever epidemic was raging in the Gulf Coastal states.  This prevented some individuals in that region from attending the Exposition, and likely frightened many Northerners from attending as well.

If you look up the Bicentennial Mall on Google Maps and zoom in you can get a good view of the Centennial Memorial, about half-way down the Mall:

~Matt