A VERY RARE & QUITE INTERESTING TICKET FOR A DRAWING AT THE 1904 ST. LOUS WORLD'S FAIR

I'd say the person who filled out the front of this ticket in pencil never turned it in....or we'd never have seen it. I doubt that there are others floating around.

Our fairgoer was rather an optimist--guessing the attendance at the Exposition would be more than 38 million visitors--That was just about twice the actual attendance of 19 million.

From my reading and research on world's fairs I would think that fair promoters in St. Louis were probably happy (not ecstatic, but pleased) with just under 20 million attending the fair. That is a lot of tickets! They'd have been over the moon as the expression goes if almost 40 million fairgoers descended on St. Louis in 1904.

It has been a decent fair for collectors with a nice selection of souvenirs as well as medals and tickets/passes and I'm sure most collectors view it as one of the major fairs of the 20th century.

Take a moment to review the prizes offeredfrom this whiskey distiller. The winner, closest to guessing the attendance, received (we assume they paid off!) 120 quarts of whiskey. And the various runners-up also received a total of 120 quarts of whiskey.
You can see that the only prize not their whiskey was the alternate choice for the grand prize winner--$100 in gold. Let's assume that was five double eagles ($20 coins) which at the time would have been worth less than those cases of whiskey I believe.

But today, depending on which gold coins they gave out--the 5 20-dollar coins, 10 ten-dollar coins or 20-five dollar coins it would look mighty good to perhaps a great great grandchild of the winner--at least $25,000 120 years after the exposition.

I've always been appreciative of unusual tickets, especially ones that tell a story and this one sure does. And it's a tad cheaper than their grand prize.