All of our ancestors living in area at that time went to the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition or World’s Fair held in Seattle the summer and early autumn of 1909. They saw the things reproduced on the postcards from the Fair when they were brand new and bigger than life. Those of us who are familiar with the University of Washington campus can place these attractions in our mind’s eye but it is still hard to imagine what it must have been like in real life.
The Forestry building has been mentioned in other postcard Thursday posts and since there are several different cards with various views of this amazing structure I’m putting them up this week. It was said to have been the largest “log cabin” ever constructed and was huge as you can tell from this card. Note how small the people appear in front of the steps leading up to the entrance. As the building aged some of the wood became infested with beetles and the weather in the Pacific Northwest is wet, soggy, and generally hard on untreated wood, so the building had to be demolished when it could no longer be reasonably repaired.
An interesting side note about the coloration on these post cards-- color film was not yet in use when these pictures were taken so the postcard company had the black & white photographs tinted by hand and then reproduced them as colored cards. On some of the cards the tinting is much better than on others.
Here is another view from the corner of the building.
This next card gives us a look inside the building where we see a woman descending the stairs and a man peeking through the bottom support pillar.
The interior staircase.
The outside view of the colonnade.
An inside view of the colonnade.
And finally, this view is of the Forestry Building with the Band Stand in the center of the picture.
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