The term “sanitary fair,” sounds funny now—like a carnival for compulsive hand-washers—but during the Civil War, bad weather, bad food, and dirty bandages killed more soldiers than bullets. The U.S. and Western Sanitary Commissions stanched Union deaths by sending soap, gauze, nurses, and hot soup to the front, funding that work with fairs, including the roaringly successful Mississippi Valley Sanitary Fair. Housed in a temporary, 500-foot long building on Locust, it featured an art gallery; a cannon display; soda fountain; skating pond; one showroom for sewing machines, and another for farm implements; a beer garden; a “New Bedford Department,” with walrus tusks and hinged seashells; and an actress playing the Old Woman who Lived in a Shoe, who sold dolls.
Here, we see stall No. 12, the “Delphic Oracle”—though it looks more like a mystery school kissing-booth than a Pythic temple. Its columns are decorated with skulls, griffins, zodiac glyphs, and paper hearts. The bullet-shaped dome is strung with silk ropes hung with Christmas ornaments, and shelters a stuffed owl. The Daily Countersign, the fair’s in-house newsletter, boasted that the prophetess “must, by necessity, be the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter,” though all she did was spin a wheel painted with generic fortunes. But who minded? The ceilings blazed with 3,000 gas jets, and the Ladies’ Union Aid Society wheedled wreaths, rosebushes, cages of canaries, and plaster statuary from local busineses. The vision was magic for a weary city recently under martial law, its riverboats turned to floating hospitals, many of its families broken apart over diverging political views. The fair made half a million dollars in three days, though the highest admission was $2. Which kept the Union’s medical tents supplied with iodine, bouillon, and cots, all the way through the end of the war.
