Often Ignored Major Attraction at the World's Columbian Exposition

La Rabida, on the water that was nothing but swampland before Frederick Olmstead and his firm took on the monumental task of creating a grand site, was perhaps the most unobtrusive building at the World's Columbian Expo.

It didn't have the architectural impressiveness of the grand buildings of the fair nor could it compete with the creativeness and myriad architectural designs in the state, territory and country buildings.

La Rabida was a modest looking structure and inside, despite its historic displays and artifacts, was miniature in comparison totbhe massive buildings on the world's fair site. And inside it was a pleasant walk through a late 19th century museum. It was like one you might find as a modest history museum in a any number of cities in the U.S. But wasn't like the major museums in major cities; it was what you would expect to find on a vacation or a research trip.

The building was simple because it was a replica of a monastery where Columbus once stayed. Inside was a relatively small (again, compared to the gigantic grand buildings for each distinctively different structures and displays) compared to the Manufactures & Liberal Arts Building (the largest in the world!), and those devoted to electricity, transportation, fisheries and so on.

La Rabida was in a class with dozens of smaller exhibits; but the collection could;should have been turned into a book to be sold worldwide, not just as the guidebook shown here available to fairgoers.

The fair management did an excellent job of educating the public and giving them the tools (such as this guidebook) to get the most out of the largest to the smallest attractions. In my 40+ years researching, writing about and selling Columbiana I discovered this wonderful smaller museum-like building. With so much to see and with most visitors having some limits on the time they could afford at the fair, La Rabida was (for the most part) a ways down most lists of what to see in "only"a couple of weeks.

I can see how I, as a nerd student of history, might well have had to choose between one of the grand buildings or La Rabida on my last day, I would have chosen the larger building to be sure I got the maximum time I had left.

So, here is a nice guide for a walk through La Rabida including the history of the building/monastery. Fair figures were not tallied specifically by attendence at exhibits, villages and buildings. They were tallied by sales to visitors, but that was a partially inadequate mode of comparison. not much was spent here, but this book(let)
provides an excellent walk-through and tally of the items included. these included Columbus signed documents and information about all three of his voyages to America.

If you consider yourself a serious student of the history of Columbus the man and the explorer, this was the place to get it. And this is the book that tells you exactly what artifacts were on display.

I have found over the years that more than a few collectors have built a nice library of the guides to exhibits and buildings. This doesn't look like a mate to other Conkey published guides by building and genre, but it belongs next to the many others for buildings, areas of the fair and so on.

This is one of the rarer guides from all of the areas of the expo. It is one I sought out years ago when researching the books I was writing and I was more than a little pleased to find this one just as I was aassembling the best (and thus most accurate) of the many guides published as "official" by fair management, and dozens of others for single exhibits, entire buildings and more.