When the Missouri History Museum reopens an updated and enhanced version of its 1904 World’s Fair exhibit later this month, officials want visitors to take away a different and more complex narrative than perhaps they've heard in the past.
The museum, at 5700 Lindell Blvd. in Forest Park, on April 27 will reopen the exhibit, which was closed a year ago for the update.
The new exhibit’s centerpiece is an expansive 1:400 scale model of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition’s fairgrounds. An image of what the grounds look like now is periodically projected on top of the model, giving visitors an understanding of the fair’s size and layout.
The museum invested about $2.5 million to construct the exhibit, financed in part by the Eric P. and Evelyn E. Newman Foundation, museum officials said.
Public Historian Adam Kloppe said he’s been working on this iteration of the exhibit for more than five years. It replaces the museum's previous World's Fair exhibit, which closed last April after having been on display for nearly 20 years.
“It was just time to tell a different story,” said Kloppe, adding that the new exhibit puts “more focus on the complexity of the fair.”
For instance, few people today talk about the Philippine Village, a human zoo for which more than 1,000 Filipinos were trafficked to St. Louis and made to live on display in replicas of their tribal communities, despite it being one of the event’s most-visited exhibits.
The 1904 World’s Fair took place shortly after the U.S. colonized the Philippines, and the Philippine Village was a government campaign designed to show Filipinos as savages “in need of U.S. intervention,” said Kloppe.
Also on display at the fair were veterans from both sides of the Boer Wars, which were fought over British control of South Africa, who reenacted battles in which they had fought two years prior.
“I think a lot of the time in the past, people didn’t want to talk about those things because it’s uncomfortable and difficult,” Kloppe said of the 1904 exhibits. “But those things had huge impacts on people, and they are stories that need to be told.”
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Original artifacts from the 1904 World's Fair on diplay at new 1904 World's Fair exhibit at the Missouri History Museum.
By the numbers
Almost 19.7 million people, each paying 50 cents, passed through the turnstiles of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in St. Louis from April 30 to Dec. 1, 1904.
As a result, the exposition generated about $5.6 million from admission fees alone. Adjusted for inflation since 1913 — nearly a decade after the fair took place, but the earliest year on record for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis’ inflation calculator — this figure is equivalent to nearly $172.7 million in 2023.
It cost $15 million to construct the fair, which again adjusted for inflation since 1913 is equivalent to about $462.5 million in 2023. The project was financed by $5 million each from the federal government, state and local governments, and individual donors who bought stock in the fair.
“World’s fairs tend to be money-losing propositions, but this one actually made money,” Kloppe said.
The exhibition operated in the green in part because additional revenue streams existed within the fairgrounds.
For instance, it cost an additional 50 cents, equivalent to $15.42 in 2023, to ride the original Ferris Wheel. The attraction stood 26-stories tall and lasted about 40 minutes, taking passengers around two revolutions of the wheel.
And many of the individual donors of the fair passed on collecting their stock options after the fair’s conclusion, opting instead to have that money put toward the construction of permanent buildings memorializing the event, said Sharon Smith, the Missouri History Museum’s curator of civic and personal identity.
Several of these building still stand in Forest Park today, such as the World’s Fair Pavilion and the Jefferson Memorial Building, which houses the Missouri History Museum.
Part of a larger plan
The reimagined 1904 World’s Fair exhibit marks the first of several new galleries slated to open at the Missouri History Museum in the coming years.
The museum will next year open “Collected,” a gallery designed to “let artifacts tell their own stories” and show off the Missouri Historical Society’s various collections, said Kloppe. And the museum in 2026 plans open a new exhibit on its second floor called “Gallery STL,” which will tell a decade-by-decade walkthrough of St. Louis’ history.
These exhibits are all a part of the museum’s previously announced $50 million master plan, set to take it through 2028. This plan includes several already-completed projects, such as upgrades to the museum’s front entrance; a new restaurant concept, The Key Bistro, which opened last summer; and a new museum shop, Sold on St. Louis, highlighting the city’s local brands and vendors.
The Missouri Historical Society operates the museum in Forest Park, the MHS Library & Research Center and the Soldiers Memorial Military Museum downtown. The nonprofit society receives funding from the Zoo-Museum District, which is funded by a property tax in the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County, as well as from private donations.
The nonprofit organization reported total 2022 revenue of $19.2 million and expenses of $19.8 million, compared with 2021 revenue of $36.2 million and expenses of $18.5 million, according to its most recent available tax filings. It had assets of $134.3 million at the end of 2022, with liabilities of $3.3 million.
