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The Richmond Dispatch provided this rendering of festivities looking east from Foushee toward the carnival arch and City Hall. (Image courtesy Library of Congress)
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A Richmond Dispatch artist depicts the carnival’s opening ceremonies. The umbrellas are shields from the afternoon sun. (Image courtesy Library of Congress)
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From their newspaper likenesses they don't appear to be a fun-loving bunch, yet these are some of the men who brought the 1900 carnival to the city's streets, among them lawyer John Garland Pollard (top, second from right), whose political life included a 1930-34 term as Virginia's governor. Oliver Herbert Funsten (bottom, left) was a major Realtor, and next to him is hotelier William Rueger, whose establishment evolved into the present Commonwealth Suites. (Image courtesy Library of Congress)
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Richmond-built ships: On May 15, in conjunction with the carnival festivities, the Trigg Shipyards (situated around today's Great Shiplock Park) with great fanfare launched the 175-foot U.S. Navy torpedo boat Thornton. The vessel went in and out of service until its presumed scrapping in 1920. (Image courtesy Library of Congress)
Richmonders realized something big was in the offing.
In the spring of 1900, at 10th Street by City Hall, there arose an impressive 60-foot-high triumphal arch made of wood and covered by sculpted plaster. Paid for almost entirely with children’s dimes and designed by the architectural firm of Noland & Baskervill, it bore a message written in capital letters by incandescent bulbs: “WELCOME.”
The Richmond Carnival and Free Street Fair ran for one momentous week, May 14-19, filling downtown from Adams to 12th streets and attracting more than 100,000 people to a dazzling array of entertainments and diversions.
The fair interrupted traffic, closed schools and suspended government business.
This was an era of great fairs and expositions: the World’s Fairs in Chicago (1893), London (1899) and Paris (1900). Richmond’s leaders of commerce wrapped their own mercantile motivations in the finery of aesthetic aspiration and civic boosterism.
The Richmond Carnival Association contracted the Bostock-Ferari company, a modern touring carnival business based in New York. In April, a committee traveled to New York to judge the shows for any potential to offend public morals. Among the approved attractions were an array of quasi-anthropological and fully exploitative presentations, including an “African village” with “genuine Boer people” and natives “representing the various … tribes of the vicinity,” as well as a “genuine gypsy camp” at Jefferson and Broad giving “perfect insight into the life and habits of this peculiar people,” with fortune-telling. Meanwhile, the “Streets of All Nations,” spread over Ninth, 10th and Capitol streets, promised former residents of nations from Germany to India; Japanese jugglers; and a “Hindoo Theatre with dancing girls, magicians, etc.”
Bostock’s offerings also included the Crystal Maze of 60 mirrors, a European-constructed Venetian gondola ride powered by singing gondoliers on the triangle lot at Broad and Brook (where today Maggie Walker’s monument stands), and trained animals in seven cages — among them 20 lions and a boxing kangaroo. The Richmond Dispatch touted how the entire “Bostock Aggregation” required 20 60-foot-long railroad cars for transportation.
Besides these imported diversions, the carnival association also offered up a floral parade, military demonstrations and a choir of 3,000 public schoolchildren.
At noon on May 14, the festivities began, with several bands converging upon the stand between Third and Fourth streets — all playing “Dixie.” This started the prayer and speeches, including Richmond Times publisher Joseph Bryan’s discourse tracing the city’s history from the Civil War to the rebirth that the fair exemplified.
At around 9 p.m. in the Richmond Auditorium (later remade for Virginia Commonwealth University’s Cary Street gym), the coronation of Henry Lee Valentine as king of the carnival was witnessed by some 12,000 people.
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Businessman Henry Lee Valentine was crowned king of the carnival. (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
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Broad Street retailers built fanciful kiosks for displays. At Fourth Street, the entry for women’s and children’s clothing store Kaufmann & Co. is dark blue and trimmed in white with a dome lit by 250 incandescent lights. (Photo courtesy collection of Richard Bland)
The next evening, in a pageant full of flowers and band music, “tens of thousands” of spectators witnessed a Fairyland Parade headed by King Henry and his court. Each horse-drawn float depicted its own tableau, from a prince’s fall into the Pit of Despair to his betrothal to Sleeping Beauty. The illusion and reality combusted when the Pit of Despair caught fire on Adams Street and the Royal Car’s drapery ignited at First Street. Fire extinguishers quelled the flames without injuries.
Sponsoring enterprises built substantial pavilions that provided showrooms for companies’ wares, comfort for visitors and sites for hourly promotional contests: Kaempf’s on Ninth Street was ready to award the prettiest lady clerk of any carnival booth a box of candy, while the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks promised a box of El Truro Cigars to the ugliest out-of-towner, as decided upon “by a committee of ladies.”
The promise of cigars also lured passersby to throw balls “at the head of a black man with the unbreakable skull,” as the Times described it, reporting with the typical and casually cruel tone of the day. A “fakir” handed three balls to tossers for a nickel. The balls flew, and the man’s head jerked and dodged without injury. Then a man “weighing a full 200 pounds” took matters into his ample hands. His first two direct hits did nothing. Then the target caught sight of a friend and began distractedly talking. The thrower “gave three awful swings of his great arm and hurtled the ball,” which hit its mark square on the target’s crown, but the projectile bounced, shattering a “French plate glass window in Smithdeal’s Business College. … Then the ball rolled off in a corner, well satisfied with its work.” The head man finished his conversation then announced, “Keep it up, gem’men; the harder they come, the more I likes’em.”
Newspaper accounts blithely employed epithets to describe nonwhite entertainers and spectators alike. John Mitchell Jr., the black editor of the weekly Jackson Ward-based Richmond Planet, largely eschewed coverage of the fair, though the Planet did mention a rough-hewn log cabin on display, because inside there was not only an oil painting of Thomas Jefferson, but also the work of James Conway Farley, a pioneering black photographer operating as the Jefferson Fine Art Co. at 523 E. Broad St.
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A Fairyland Parade featured horse-drawn floats depicting elaborate fairy tales. (Image courtesy Library of Congress)
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Many of the stores along Broad Street constructed frequently elaborate street kiosks or pavilions, some designed by prominent architects, to provide exhibitions of goods and services, award prizes for contests, and give comfort to carnival goers with relief from heat or sudden rain and often to rest their sore feet. (Image courtesy Library of Congress)
On the final evening of the fair, a massive crowd surged around the large stands between Third and Fourth streets on Broad’s north side to observe a cakewalk dance performed by, the newspaper assured, “genuine negroes” of Jackson Ward. The cakewalk originated in the plantation South, where slaves competed through dance for a special cake; their choreography satirized formal white dances mashed up with their own inventions for comic lampooning. This day’s demonstration ended not in laughter but screams.
A disturbance caused by a mule-driven streetcar attempting to pass through the crowd moved the mass of spectators against the platform. In search of a better view and an escape from the press of bodies, more than a dozen boys had clambered upon the security railings 12 feet above the street. The support “broke with a crash,” tumbling the youngsters into the throng on the sidewalk below and causing a frightened rush. When the crowd momentarily cleared, 12-year-old Robert Lee Smith, “a small colored boy,” as the Times put it, was found alive but trampled, his left leg broken and body bruised. An official on the stand urged the cakewalk to continue to prevent a stampede. The entertainment resumed, and “the excitement was soon forgotten,” the Times reported, “as they cheered their favorites in the rag-time performance.”
At midnight, the Bostock aggregation dismantled its attractions to get on the road for Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Public mentions in the papers by carnival organizers began making suggestions that the festival become an annual “permanent institution.” Valentine, the carnival’s short-lived king, advocated a Tri-State Association comprising Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina, to be capitalized by $25,000 to $50,000.
The subsequent lawsuit by the family of Robert Lee Smith for $2,500 in damages wound its way through trials and counter-trials. The Dispatch editorially called for dismissal due to the potential for Richmond to incur bad publicity. Yet the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals in January 1903 upheld the claim, albeit for $500.
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In the floral parade, George King drives a cart adorned with scarlet poppies and pulled by a snow-white goat. (Photo courtesy collection of Richard Bland)
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The Bostock Midway & Carnival Co.'s animals included camels for the "Streets of Cairo" attraction, and visitors paid for rides on these humped creatures and elephants, too. On May 19, members of the city's carnival association, dressed for the occasion, paraded on camel back down Broad Street. (Photo courtesy collection of Richard Bland )
The settlement left the association with $230, which went to the Virginia Home for the Incurables, and enthusiasm for another spring event faded.
Richmond couldn’t quite quit the carnival arch, though.
City officials debated its fate, while the United Daughters of the Confederacy noted the popularity of the carnival arch for visitors and photographic opportunities and considered a version for Monroe Park. That concept didn’t take hold, and the carnival arch’s crumbling cornices threatened to “involve the city in a damage suit,” as the Dispatch described. The cornices got removed, and decorators for the autumn conventions of the Odd-Fellows, Firefighters and American Bankers dressed the shabby arch in flowers and bunting. By Oct. 20, it was taken down, and the last of the carnival’s visible memory finally vanished.
Some decades later, broader-based festivities have evolved to embrace neighborhoods and various ethnicities, animals (though not boxing kangaroos), food, art and music — celebrations where everyone is now WELCOME.