Visit the museum to learn about how people in our area – Alvarado, Alviso, Centerville, Decoto, Drawbridge, Irvington, Mission San Jose, Newark, Niles, and Warm Springs (Today’s cities of Fremont, Newark and Union City) – took time from their daily lives to visit the fair once, twice, and even many times over the 10 months that the fair welcomed the world to San Francisco.
The Innocent Fair on PPIE100, nostalgia from 1962
TBD
Visit us in the Shinn House Museum. The museum is open first Wednesday and third Sunday when the house is open for tours and for special events.
Florence Shinn's mother, Emily Mayhew, kept a diary on her visit to the PPIE. She stayed at the Inside Inn.
Charles Howard Shinn selected wood slabs for the Hoo Hoo House exhibit.
Bits and pieces of memorabilia from 1915 including clothing.
The 20-acre park has new interpretive boards about the history of the California Nursery Company, established in 1884 in Niles. When the museum is open, you can see the exhibit about Moving the Palms from Niles to San Francisco to create the Avenue of Palms, a major feature of the Exposition.
Read about the landscaping of the Exposition in the Summer 2015 Eden Journal . The California Nursery provided plants to the Exposition. See "Nursery Order for the Avenue of Palms." Other articles about Exposition Landscaping were written by Laura Ackley and Marlea Graham,.
The 1915 catalog was well illustrated with photos and included some photos related to the PPIE.
The Show Gardens at the front of the park were created in 1934 and so they were not here in 1915. Instead cars made their way through what is now the Rose Garden. The palms and the olives marked out this nursery block and were here since the late 1880s.
Volunteers of the California Nursery Garden Club are in the Office Gardens most Mondays and Thursdays. Stop by to visit.
Rancho Arroyo Park is on Montecito Drive near Posada Way.
If you walk up to the train tracks and BART tracks, this is where Eberly siding was located - where the palms (and other plants) were loaded onto the Western Pacific Railway cars at Eberly siding. Your phone may say that this location is "Eberly" which was named after the California Nursery manager, W.V. Eberly. The name has stuck. Do the neighbors living next to the park know the monumental palms and trees that left from here?
BART follows the Western Pacific right-of-way much of the way to Oakland. Next time you are on BART, you can imagine what the people of Hayward and San Leandro thought about seeing huge palms and other trees passing by.
The Western Pacific Oakland Mole is where passengers and palms would have taken a ferry or barge to the Exposition site.
Horace Cotton wrote his thesis on the landscaping of the Exposition. Two photos from his thesis p.56-57 are photos taken from Eberly. One other photo is of the palms being boxed.
Niles Station is where many Niles passengers would have boarded the train to SF. Visit the Niles Depot Museum in downtown Niles. Take a ride on the Niles Canyon Railway which runs on a portion of the Transcontinental Railroad.
You can drive to Oakland to the Middle Harbor Shoreline Park to see where the palms and passengers would have made a connection to a ferry. A little museum is there to tell the history.
This fanciful (and impossible) picture would have whetted the appetites of the Pacific Service Magazine readers.
Niles/Shinn Station was the Western Pacific Railway station that crossed the Shinn property. Some visitors (those who lived in Centerville?) would have taken the train to SF from here. The train would have taken passengers to the Western Pacific Mole, which was just south of the Central Pacific Long Wharf. The gravel plant - or whatever that is today - was the location of the old station
The Poppy Nymph - was she at the PPIE or wasn't she? One side and the other. It is still worth a visit to the Niles library which is a very tiny, historic, and charming library. It is only open on Fridays. Have lunch in Niles and browse the shops. and visit the Niles Depot Museum.
Liberty Bell Day, July 17, 1915. This was a really big deal to have the Liberty Bell come through your town. The Liberty Bell crossed the SF Bay at Dumbarton cutoff at Newark. It did not go through Oakland and then on the ferry. Find the link for this article when CDNC is back up. What towns did it pass through?
“A Model-T was produced every ten minutes at Henry Ford’s Concession in the Palace of Transportation."
Volume 3 of Frank Morton Todd's The story of the exposition : being the official history of the international celebration held at San Francisco in 1915 to commemorate the discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the construction of the Panama Canal
What did the newspapers report?
ALAMEDA DAY AT THE FAIR Practically All of Alameda County Attended the Big Exposition Thursday. WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP IS WELL REPRESENTED Industrial Parade Has Floats Representing Great Variety of Manufactured Goods of Alameda County.
Alameda county was deserted Thursday, the big Alameda County day at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition at San Francisco. Financially and socially, the county was transplanted from the eastern shores of the bay to San Francisco. Even throughout Washington township business was almost an unknown thing. Practically every store closed that was not compelled by legal procedure or the laws of necessity to keep its doors open. Many people went from the smaller town of the county, more than fifty from Niles, a large number from Irvington, Mision San Jose, Centerville, Newark, Alvarado, Decoto and more northern towns. Livermore and Pleasanton sent a special train. The celebration in San Francisco began with the industrial parade at 10 o’clock. Nearly sixty floats, representing everything from a boat to a tooth pick that is manufactured in this county was in the parade. place at the exposition grounds In the afternoon games ...sports were in order. ...was closed with a spectacular display of fireworks.
The PPIE 100 was a state-wide celebration of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Visit the old website to see the many fabulous exhibits.
Articles written for 2015 events
For more on the museum organizations see the MAFUN - Museum Alliance of Fremont, Union City, and Newark