St. Johnsbury Caledonian

Centennial, May 27th, 1876.

To the Editor of the Caledonian:

This is undoubtedly the finest and most interesting exhibition ever offered us in the wide world, and worth more than a voyage around it. The ground is somewhat circular, some two miles in circumference. It is just uneven enough: with little ridges and valleys and lumps and scattering forest trees all over it. All that art and taste could do has been done to embellish and beautify it with green lawns, walks, shrubs and flowers, and little lakes and fountains.

Each nation and state has built little cottage residences of its own material and in its own style and scattered them all around the grounds. The exhibition buildings are grand in outline and beautiful in finish. Some are built of glass and iron, some of marble, some of wood no two are alike. The largest covers more than twenty acres, and others are of all sizes down to ten feet square.

These buildings, more than 200 in number, are all new and harmoniously arranged, all together presenting a superb landscape picture, unlike any other on the globe.

Inside these exhibition buildings, the four quarters of the world and the islands of the sea have spread out their choicest treasures of science and art and industry Here are machines that can do nearly all the work of man's hands. With one we can with ease lift weights of thousands of tons, and with another thread a needle. One machine sows and covers the wheat, and another gathers and threshes it and delivers it cleaned in bags in the field: another receives the end of a coil of wire and gives back pins finished and stuck on paper folded ready for sale. Uncle Sam shows us in his building a great gun that carries a ball that weighs 1000 lbs., and requires 200 lbs. of powder for a charge, also a cigar-shaped torpedo thirty feet long, that can be sent by its own machinery under water out of sight on any compass line, and the distance being ascertained, it can be exploded at the right instant and destroy in a moment the largest vessel.

The costumes of the different countries afford a pleasing study and the contrast is wonderful between the fig-leaf apron worn by mother Eve, and dresses of the richest silks, trimmed with the finest laces and diamonds and gold, with trains three yards long, more gorgeous than the lilies of the field. In pottery the rude clay dishes of primitive man are in contrast with the finest porcelain and pitchers and jars of the Japanese and Chinese, ornamented with figures, satyrs, and strange, odd forms and caricatures of living beings, grotesque and laughable in the extreme.

The stone ax and knife and arrow point and hammer of the ancients are contrasted also with the most perfect cutlery and arms of the present.

Two large buildings are filled with thousands of the choicest paintings and the finest pieces of statuary ever made: many of them expressing a higher intelligence, a purer charity, a grander faith, a more chaste love than man has possessed since shut out of Eden, and a perfection of loveliness and beauty much beyond that of any human being. That they seem creations of inspiration and portraits of what we hope to be in the great hereafter. Man drunk in the gutter, or dying, lying half dead on the gilded, seems so brutish and devilish that his existence might well terminate here: but judged by his works gathered in this exposition, he seems but little lower than the angels, a fellow with capacities and aspirations and longings grand to him, to ever extinguished by the silence and darkness of the grave.

The accommodations here are ample, and prices reasonable. Street cars run from the depot to the exhibition grounds and to the hotels near the grounds. The grand Exposition Hotel near the grounds is new, neat and comfortable, and charges two dollars and fifty cents a day for lodging, breakfast and supper. Dinner or lunch is taken on the ground at the institutions of public comfort, which compare favorably with the best railroad eating saloons in quality and price.

Or one can get a dinner at the French saloon, or try the fine German bread, ham and beer, or try the nice fat puppy of the Chinese.

Some parts of the ground are not yet quite finished up, some buildings not completed, and some articles for exhibition are not set in place, but all will soon be done. Railroad fares have been reduced about 20 per cent. Later they will likely be more reduced. The attendance is yet small. Those coming now will find enough to see and avoid crowds and the temperature agreeable, and the earth all green and bright in her vernal robes, and fragrant with bud and blossom.

D. C.