Wheel Burrow

Professor Hopes She Can Unearth Ferris' Big Ride in Park Landfills

by Tom Uhlenbrock

orig. published February 11, 1996

Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, copyright 1996.

George Ferris Jr.'s masterpiece stood 265 feet high over the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, But when the fair ended, the giant wheel -- the biggest ever -- was dropped with 100 pounds of dynamite.

What happened after that is a nearly century-old mystery. Local legend says the Ferris wheel -- or what is left -- was buried with the rest of the fair's rubble in makeshift landfills at Forest Park.

Carol Diaz-Granados hops to solve that mystery this summer by using ground-penetrating radar to find the resting place of the wheel's 45-foot-long axle.

"The thing I want to emphasize is, this is not Geraldo Rivera looking for Al Capone's vault," said Diaz-Granados, referring to the TV personality's failed attempt on live television to uncover significant artifacts on Capone's vault.

Diaz-Granados is not a treasure hunter. She teaches at Washington University and Maryville University, and is past president of the Missouri Association of Professional Archeologists.

She has a contract with the city to excavate the World's Fair landfills in Forest Park. She has directed students at the digs for 12 summers.

So far, they have uncovered 7,000 objects, all of which belong to the city. Some of the best finds will go on display in a World's Fair exhibit that opens June 22 at the History Museum in the park.

To the average eye, most of the pieces recovered at the digs are bits and pieces, worthless in the active market of world's Fair memorabilia and souvenirs.

But to Diaz-Granados, they offer an insight to a time that still reigns as St. Louis' finest hour.

In a storage area of the History Museum annex on Skinker Boulevard, Diaz-Granados showed off some of the larger pieces last week. Many are fragments -- legs, heads and torsos -- of the 1,500 statues at the fair.

Diaz-Granados explained that the Chicago Wrecking Co. was the low bidder -- $400,000 -- for dismantling the fair. The company's workers salvaged what they could and demolished the rest, burying the debris in at lest three landfills.

The statues and many of the fair's decorative elements were made of molded plaster of Paris strengthened with fibers. They were built to last a year.

"There was a figure of an Indian and a horse that was put in a park in north St. Louis after the fair," Diaz-Granados said. "Every time it rained, the statue melted. They tried painting it, but eventually it fell apart.

They Drank A Lot of Beer


While the large statue fragments are most impressive, Diaz-Granados said she learns more about the fair -- and the 20 million people who attended over its seven-month duration -- from the odds and ends uncovered in the landfills.

"You pick up a piece like this, and you know you're at the right spot," she said, fingering a shard of a china plate that included the words "World's Fair."

From a tray of rusted iron pieces Diaz-Granados pointed out a wire puzzle, bolts, and copper ornament from a horse's bridle and a bottle opener. "There was a lot of beer drunk at the fair," she said.

Another tray included porcelain insulators for the electrical wires and a glass tube with filament inside.

"The fair was the largest user of electricity at the turn of the century." Diaz-Granados said. "This looks like a radio tube, but an elderly gentleman told me it's a light bulb.

"They had 300,000 light bulbs at the fair. We wondered why there weren't more excavated. We found out the bulbs came from the Guarantee Electric Co. -- if it burned out, they took it back."

Diaz-Granados and park officials try to keep the landfill sites secret.

But word gets around among amateur archeologists.

Bob Foster, an inventor in Imperial, said he discovered one of the landfill sites while hunting for bottles 23 years ago as a boy in Richmond Heights. "We didn't do any digging, we just went after a rain and let the water wash thins out," he said. "It was a lot of fun going there. We found all kinds of stuff."

Foster realized the historical importance of some of his finds and offered them to the History Museum 10 years ago. At the time, storage space was scarce, and the museum rejected his offer.

But with a call for a repeat performance of the fair in 2004, interest in what took place in 1904 is picking up.

Hunt For The Wheel


Diaz-Granados feels her job is not complete while the fair's largest display, the Ferris wheel, remains missing. originally build for Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the wheel was hauled to St. Louis in 175 flatbed railcars.

Instead of seats, the wheel had 36 observation cars, each the size of a Bi-State bus. the cars held 60 passengers each, giving the wheel a capacity of 2,160 passengers at 50 cents a ride.

During the drive for scrap metal in World War II, a search was conducted for the wheel's 70-ton axle in Forest Park. A huge hole was dug in what is now a golf course, but workers found only several huge nuts that held the wheel together. The nuts weighed four pounds each.

"With the high-tech equipment we have now, we'll find it, if it's there," Diaz-Granados said. "We'll be able to close that chapter.


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