U. of C. digs for urban archeological treasuresJackson Park excavations seek artifacts from 1893 World's Columbian Exposition
By William Mullen | Tribune reporter
May 18, 2008
Rightly famous for more than a century of archeological excavations in the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Latin America, the University of Chicago lately has been working just around the corner and down the street on a dig in Jackson Park.
Among the treasures unearthed by archeologist Rebecca Graff and some of her students are rusty nails, broken crockery, pieces of glass bottles, clumps of gravel and metallic slag, now all neatly labeled in kitchen storage bags.
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Graff is thrilled with what she and her crew of 20 undergraduates have been pulling out of the park during their Friday and Saturday all-day digs. If she is right, much if not most of it is from the grounds of the World's Columbian Exposition, the fabled World's Fair that for six months in 1893 made Chicago the center of the world.
The stunning White City, with its enormous, classical exposition buildings sculpted from plaster of Paris along elegant, landscaped canals, plus a remarkable assemblage of rides, restaurants and attractions from around the world along a commercial strip called the Midway, attracted 27 million visitors.
Only one permanent exposition hall was built for the fair, the Palace of Fine Arts, which now houses the Museum of Science and Industry. Almost all of the rest was gone within months of the fair's closing, having been torn down and carted off.
Still, "not everything went," said Graff, 31, a PhD candidate and anthropology instructor whose crew has been digging since April. "We're interested in seeing what is left of the buildings themselves. I am interested in the experiences of the tourists. What were they buying, eating and drinking at the fair?"
The project is the U. of C.'s first stab at using the city itself as an urban archeology laboratory, a means of delving into the city's history and a way to give students hands-on experience with conducting scientific excavations. It is closely allied with a similar program conducted by DePaul University the last few years, which has active excavations in the Bronzeville neighborhood and the Pullman community.
Graff selected four areas in the old 633-acre fairground site to excavate. Thus far she has concentrated most of her effort on a strip just south of the Museum of Science and Industry along Cornell Drive, where the state pavilions for Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Indiana stood during the fair.
She and her undergraduate students and three teaching assistants have opened four holes there so far, each 2 meters (6.5 feet) square and just 3 feet deep, which takes them to a layer of sand dunes and marsh that were there before European settlement.
"It's not like a deep, deep tell in Israel, where your excavations go down through thousands of years of occupation in a single settlement site," she said. "Instead, we are looking at an immense area that was used by 27 million people, but for just six months in 1893."
In the upper few inches they found plenty of detritus left behind by litterbugs who used the park in the late 20th Century, particularly pull-top tabs from aluminum beer and soft-drink cans.
"These things mystified some of the students who had no clue what they were," said Graff. "They grew up after the can industry stopped that sort of litter by introducing the flip-top lids that stay attached to the can."
In each of the excavations they have encountered old pipe Graff believes was part of the fair infrastructure for water and sewage, though she said she has to do more research to confirm that. In one area they found a straight, broad strip of dark soil in sand that she said may mark the foundation line of one of the state pavilions.
"We have the original blueprints of the fair," she said, "but as it was built, those plans were often altered at the last minute so that buildings were put up in slightly different areas, and our work can now locate them exactly."
She and her students are beginning to consult with experts and look at old photos to try to research the hundreds of ceramic and glass pieces they are finding.
"We have to try to track the sherds down to recognizable objects, like the whole bottle the broken parts came from," Graff said, "seeing if we can determine what they contained and who the bottlers were.
"We know which vendors had official sanctions to sell their goods on the fairgrounds. This was an event that introduced to the world many long-standing products, like Wrigley Juicy Fruit chewing gum, Aunt Jemima pancakes, Vienna Beef hot dogs, Cracker Jack. But we know peddlers were also sneaking their goods into the fairgrounds all of the time, and maybe we will see some of those things too."
A Los Angeles native, Graff said she knew virtually nothing about the fair when she enrolled in grad school here in 1999.
When her research interest zeroed in on the fair, her family told her that one of her great-grandfathers, Russian Jewish immigrant Morris Graff, got his first steady work in America as a ditch digger on the exposition grounds.
"It has made me feel more connected to the exposition," she said.
The three other sites are near the fair's Women's Building, at the garbage crematory where fair workers daily burned trash and on the site of the Ho-o-den Japanese Palace that stood on Wooded Island until it burned down in 1946.
"The exposition site is so large and extensive, I'd like to see us working there for a long time, as long as possible," said Shannon Dawdy, Graff's doctoral adviser. Dawdy is a University of Chicago assistant professor of anthropology and one of the founders of its urban archeology project.
When she came to Chicago years ago, Dawdy said she was surprised to find nobody in Chicago was doing archeology within the city.
"My own background is urban archeology in New Orleans, with projects that had a large public outreach component," she said. "The desire to preserve the past is not strong here. Our excavation of the fairgrounds is the first project under a pilot program to train students, using the city as laboratory and an archeological site."
wmullen@tribune.comMore articles
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