Looking at the photos of the majestic buildings on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition, it’s hard to imagine that less than two years earlier, the area was just farmland on the outskirts of the city. And, by 1902, almost all of the buildings would be gone! Without physical remnants, these images are what remain to tell the story of the Pan-Am and assist visitors to the TR Site as they try to visualize the vastness of the fairgrounds and understand the elaborate nature of the temporary buildings. The images also document educational exhibits, Midway attractions, and day-to-day activities that took place during the six months of the fair.

Many of the photographs and stereoviews from the Pan-Am are professional images; in fact, all official publications and souvenirs used pictures taken by C.D. Arnold, the fair’s official photographer. However, there is also a subset of personal photographs; these are rarer due to the tight restrictions that were placed on private cameras, but they are especially fascinating because they provide insight into how an average visitor experienced the fair.

This collections spotlight is a personal photo showing a mother and son looking at and reaching towards a water buffalo that was part of the Philippine Village exhibit on the exposition’s Midway. This is a part of a series of sixteen photos that the family took on their trip to the Pan-Am. The remarkable part about these photos is that they almost all feature the family that took them. While sometimes capturing random people, most personal photos in the Site’s collection primarily focus on the buildings and the grounds. This group of photos arrived at the TR Site housed in a Kodak envelope from the Denver Dry Goods Company; opening the envelope and “discovering” these photos was incredibly exciting (I might even have jumped up and down and squealed a little bit).

See all sixteen photos here: https://nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16694coll100/id/3202/rec/1

These photos were donated to the TR Site as part of an almost 1,000 item collection from Jim Mendola in 2021. However, receiving the items is just the beginning of the process for the Site to make a collection – particularly one as large as this – usable by both Site staff and the public. Consisting primarily of photos, postcards, stereoviews, advertisements, and other paper ephemera, this collection was particularly well-suited to being digitized and placed online. The Site received an Access and Innovation Grant from the Western New York Library Resources Council to perform the needed work. As a result, one half of the items have already been added to the Site’s existing Pan-Am collection on the New York Heritage website and we hope to add the rest of the collection over the next year.

Explore the TR Site’s Pan-Am Expo collection here: https://nyheritage.org/organizations/theodore-roosevelt-inaugural-site-foundation