Not two years after the Great Easter 1913 flood, Dayton, Ohio, celebrated its comeback with an exhibit in the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco—a city celebrating its comeback after the 1906 earthquake.
The idea for
a world’s fair in San Francisco, California, to celebrate the opening of the
Panama Canal had been batting around at least since 1891. By 1904 the city was committed
to hosting the Panama-Pacific International
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| Postcard of the Dayton Flood exhibit at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, 1915. The exhibit was one of the to 10 draws at the world's fair. Credit: Glenn Koch page 20 here. |
Exposition. Two years later, on
April 18, 1906, the San Andreas Fault abruptly let loose with a magnitude 7.8
earthquake, shattering the city and igniting firestorms so powerful that fierce,
suctioning winds were felt clear across the bay. The calamity and its thousands
of fatalities redoubled the determination of city fathers to show how San
Francisco had powered back from wholesale devastation. How better to declare
“We’re back!” than to press ahead with the enormous world’s fair?
The city
leaders of Dayton, Ohio, after the Great Easter 1913 flood felt exactly the
same way. They decided to herald the Ohio city’s rebirth after flood and fire at
the exposition with an entire exhibit devoted to the 1913 flood in Dayton. Indeed,
the Dayton Flood exhibit proved to be one of the fair’s top 10 draws.
I had never
even heard of the Panama Pacific International Exposition when I first ran
across a well-preserved souvenir booklet for the Dayton Flood exhibition in the
collections of the Dayton Metro Library (shown at left) in December 2006 when I was doing research
for my book The Great Dayton Flood of
1913 (Arcadia, 2008).
But San
Francisco has not forgotten the grand exposition. All this year and into 2016,
various museums, historical societies, and other groups have collaborated to
host events and exhibits in San Francisco commemorating the centennial of the exposition—a 635-acre city
within a city
in what is now the Marina District, which ultimately attracted
nearly 19 million visitors from around the globe from February 20 through
December 4, 1915. A very nice centennial website (see its logo at right) features links to
its history, photographs, and other items of interest—including a 25-minute video with historical footage (alas, no glimpses of the Dayton Flood exhibit).
Many
photographs and postcards depict the exterior of the Dayton Flood exhibit,
which shows a mythological figure holding back gates against floodwaters trying
to burst through. But I have never seen any images depicting the interior of
the exhibit—likely in part to the prominent signs NO PICTURES (meaning no photography) posted to
entering visitors. Nonetheless, snippets from newspapers and books give an idea
of what went on inside.
 |
| One of Henry Elsworth's dramatic paintings that may have flanked the stage, from the Dayton Flood souvenir booklet. |
From what
I’ve gleaned from newspaper snippets, the interior of the Dayton Flood exhibit had
seats arranged as if in a theater with a stage in front. The stage held a model
of the city of Dayton, flanked by large, dramatic paintings depicting flood
scenes.
The flood was reconstructed in three acts. The first
 |
| Official map of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition; location of the Dayton Flood exhibit in The Zone I've circled in red. Credit: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library |
showed the city the day
before the flood; the second showed the flood itself and the fires it ignited,
ending with rain and snow; the third depicted the floodwaters receding and
leaving enormous piles of debris. As a man on stage narrated events, real water
ran through the streets of the city model, and buildings burst into real flames.
An epilogue depicted the city as harmonious and peaceful with a Wright airplane
flying overhead, as if the flood had never happened.
The painting
on the front of souvenir program from the Dayton Flood exhibit shows perhaps
more successfully than the actual sculpture what the exhibit’s exterior was
intended to depict. Inside are reproductions of paintings that may have been
the scenes lining the stage around the model city. After so many
years of seeing
the flood in black-and-white photographs, the almost photographically realistic
paintings are striking for how they bring the scenes to life in color.
Frustratingly,
the 16-page booklet says nothing about the exhibit itself, nor gives any
information about the painter, Henry Ellsworth—who also painted under the name
of Harry Ellsworth Feicht. He appears to have had a studio with assistants in
Dayton, and had attained fame for traveling with paintings he made depicting
the passion of Christ as reenacted once a decade in the German town of Oberammergau;
scenes from the passion play he sold as stereoopticon views.
A wealthy
promoter, Feicht a/k/a Ellsworth instantly recognized enormous opportunity in
Dayton’s devastating 1913 flood of late March and early April for a concession
at the planned world’s fair: by the end of May, he was off to San Francisco to
select a site for his exhibit.
Judging from credit given on the program booklet’s title page (shown at right), he may also
have had some support—or at least tacit consent—from John H. Patterson,
president of National Cash Register, Dayton’s largest employer, whose rescue
work during the 1913 flood saved him from Federal prison for his thuggish
monopolistic business practices (see
“The Villain Who Stole the Flood”). Ellsworth
didn’t miss a bet in publicizing the exhibit, either, taking out display ads in
newspapers promoting it as “The Scenic Production With a ‘Soul’” (see left).
The Dayton Flood
exhibit, along with the rest of the fair, closed on December 4, 1915.
Today, the
only building that remains from the PPIE is San Francisco’s magnificent Palace
of Fine Arts. It almost didn’t survive. According to historian
Philip Fradkin in his wonderful book on the 1906 earthquake,
all the buildings from the world’s fair were immediately razed and the land
fill on which it was built was turned into a city dump including charred
remains of buildings ruined by the earthquake. Eventually the land was reclaimed as the Marina
District. However, mystifyingly after the massive earthquake, San Francisco’s building
codes were weakened. When the Loma Prieta earthquake hit in 1989, the fill land
turned to jelly and fires raged in that section of the city, put out by water
from around the Palace of Fine Arts.
©2015 Trudy
E. Bell
Selected references
The single best
book I’ve read on the 1906 earthquake is Philip L. Fradkin, The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906:
How San Francisco Nearly Destroyed Itself, University of California Press,
2005.
For images
of the devastation to Dayton of flood and fire, see “Like a War Zone.”
For links to movies of the hauntingly similar devastation of San Francisco seven
years earlier, see “Screening Disaster.”
Bell,
Trudy E., The Great Dayton Flood of 1913,
Arcadia Publishing, 2008. Picture book of nearly 200 images of the flood in
Dayton, rescue efforts, recovery, and the construction of the Miami Conservancy
District dry dams for flood control, including several pictures of Cox.
(Author’s shameless marketing plug: Copies are available directly from me for
the cover price of $21.99 plus shipping, complete with inscription of your choice;
for details, e-mail me.)
