Revisit 1876 Exhibition
Monday-Saturday, June 25 – December | 10 a.m.-6 p.m.
The first officially recognized world’s fair on U.S. soil unfolded across 450 acres of Fairmount Park, drawing 10 million visitors (equivalent to one-fifth of the country’s population at the time) over 172 days. They arrived from around the world and from every corner of the U.S., carried by the same expanding national rail network being celebrated at the fair.
Only 11 years after the Civil War, the country had become an industrial powerhouse yet still wrestled with the unfinished work of Reconstruction. The Centennial Exposition aimed to project to the world a reunited, thriving America, though the reality was something less. Esteemed abolitionist Frederick Douglass was prevented from speaking at the opening ceremony. Women and Black Americans were largely written out of the official narrative and events. Factory workers and laborers were just beginning to organize to reshape their conditions. This exhibition aims to tell a more complete story about Philadelphia in 1876.
The 1876 fair was unlike anything the world had seen. Visitors marveled at the giant Corliss steam engine, a Baldwin locomotive built right here in Philadelphia, and scores of other machines. They encountered the typewriter and the telephone for the first time. They tasted popcorn and Hires Root Beer. And they climbed into the torch-bearing arm of the Statue of Liberty, displayed to raise funds for the full monument that would not be completed for another decade.
This exhibition features stories that history often leaves out. It traces the origins of Philadelphia’s rowhouse neighborhoods, the rise of new modes of transportation, and the birth of the city’s tourism industry — and even 19th-century predecessors of Instagram and Airbnb. It invites visitors to explore destinations across the city connected to the Centennial.
View the Revisit 1876 exhibition brochure here.
Help support this important Philadelphia story today!
The Center City District Foundation is proud to present this new exhibit, opening June 25 through December on the ground floor of The Lits Building at 8th and Market streets.