Existing comment:
The 1915 Panama-California Exposition:
In 1909, San Diego announced it would celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal in 1915 with a world's fair.
The county's population was only 61,000, but with the first deep-water port on the West Coast north of Mexico, many thought the publicity would increase local business and population. San Diego was the smallest city to propose a world's fair, and six months after it presented its plans, San Francisco, a city with over 400,000 people, announced a federally approved, official exposition. The citizens of San Diego did not waver and courageously continued toward their goal. San Francisco planned a commercial and industrial fair; thus San Diego proposed an artistic and educational exposition. The 1400-acre City Park, future site of the Exposition, was renamed Balboa Park in 1910 and a magnificent city of Spanish Colonial architecture arose.
The Smithsonian Connection:
The Exposition committee assigned Edgar L. Hewett, of the School of American Archeology, to put together a comprehensive exhibition called "The Story of Man Through the Ages." He enlisted the help of the Smithsonian Institution and two of its staff members: William H. Holmes for the ethnographic and archeological content, and Alex Hrdlicka for the physical anthropology component. Hrdlicka was instructed to mount the largest physical anthropology exhibit ever assembled.
Hrdlicka sent field workers to Africa, the Ukraine, Alaska, and the Philippines, which he traveled to Peru, Europe, Mongolia, and Siberia to collect skeletal material, casts, and photographs for the exhibition. The result was a five-room gallery in which one of the rooms was devoted entirely to human evolution. Its centerpiece was a series of ten large plaster reconstructions of early fossil humans.
The Exposition was a great success and was extended through 1916. The San Diego Museum Association (which later became the Museum of man) was incorporated and became the owner of the collections. |