The city at the world's fair: the exposition search

The city at the WORLD'S fair

Lead: Chicago in 1893 was close enough to this town — a rail ride on lines that ran through it — that a Terre Coupee exhibitor at the World's Columbian Exposition is a fair question, and this row searched the exposition record for the town and its firms and prints the result at the size the search reached.

The instruments searched are the exposition's own: the Official Directory of the World's Columbian Exposition (Moses Purnell Handy's reference book of exhibitors and exhibits, W. B. Conkey, 1893), the official catalogue tradition that runs beside it, and the state volume Indiana at the World's Columbian Exposition (1893), all in the HathiTrust and Google Books circulation this row specifies. Searched for New Carlisle, for Olive Township, and for the town's firms as this build knows them, those records returned no exhibitor under the town's name at index level: no firm, farm or person of New Carlisle is printed as an 1893 exhibitor in this article, because none was verified in the records searched. Later expositions stand at the same documented size: no town exhibitor was returned for them in the searches run, and none is claimed. As with the state fair row, the limit of the instrument is stated with the result — Handy is a directory of more than a thousand pages, imperfectly indexed in its digital runs, and an index-level blank is a searched result, not a proof that no township hand ever carried an exhibit to Jackson Park. The roll therefore prints as searched-and-not-found, with the full-text read of Indiana at the World's Columbian Exposition and the Handy directory named, in the closure file, as the settler that would turn this searched result into a settled one. What can be said positively is the frame itself: the exposition happened ninety miles from a town whose railroad had run since 1852, its Indiana volume exists to be read, and this town's name has not been found in it yet.

Sources:

1. Handy, Moses Purnell, The Official Directory of the World's Columbian Exposition, May 1st to October 30th, 1893 (W. B. Conkey Co., 1893) — exhibitors and exhibits reference, searched at index level.
2. Indiana at the World's Columbian Exposition (1893) — state exposition volume, as listed in the exposition bibliography and library record.
3. World's Columbian Exposition, Official Catalogue tradition (1893), HathiTrust / Google Books runs.