WORLD'S COLUMBIAN GERMAN VILLAGE TICKET, 10 CENTS/CONCESSION #7

For those not familiar with this Midway attraction in Chicago in 1893 (for many of you who are quite familiar, please bear with me), the German Village was one of the largest and most popular concessions on the Columbian Exposition's Midway.

This attraction issued four tickets that are all very similar other than the denomination. This is the lowest of them, with the others for 25 and 50 cents and one dollar. I have discovered that many collectors were not aware of the one dollar ticket. I've never thought any denomination was rarer than another in the German Village. But typically, rarity increases as the denomination does. This applies to all of the Columbian tickets, as well as others.

One has to remember how far a dollar went in 1893. In our Midway history (published in 2017 by the University of Illlinois Press) we included information from a fairgoer's diary--his log of expenses. I was very pleased to find it and I am still surprised when I find things that by all counts wouldn't be around 130 years later. Somehow it did survive those many years. It was very telling, providing a light shining on spending toward the end of the 19th century. One problem that occurs often when one finds a diary: It doesn't have the name or information about the diarist. Why would you write down such information when as a diary, it's just private inormation from you--to you.

As an aside, when Heritage sold my ticket collection a couple of non-ticket items were included. One was information belonging to fair worker for whom we did know his name because his pass was included when we purchased his "daytimer."

The sale also included a truly wonderful diary of a young woman who either cared for or taught a small number of girls. It was so frustrating not knowing anything about her, but through her writing I began to learn about her life, her impressions of the fair. The diary was very insightful and spoke a great deal about "the girls" and perhaps a gentleman friend or a boyfriend she referenced many times not about her feelings or emotions, just notations to herself about where she met him for events, what he did, hgow they attended fair events together and so on. She kept the diary primarily during the Columbian Expo and I'm sure she began it as a way to document her summer. I estimated from her notes that she visited the fair as many as 50 times. Her notes told so much about her by way of her observations that seemed much more like reporting than personal thoughts.

It would have been wonderful to have had just a few details from our diarist--her age, which would tell a great deal. It appeared that she may have been staying with relatives in Chicago, primarily because of the fair. One casual entry mentioned "taking (her) wheel to the fair!"

I assume that was her velocipede, a bycicle-like with a gigantic front wheel and tiny rear one. Can you picture say an 18-24 year old young woman in a long flowery summer dress pedaling perhaps a mile through neighborhoods en route to the fair. I have no idea where she parked it while spending a day at the fair.

She never spoke of tickets, but did discuss buying a few souvenirs and gifts for the girls; prices were never mentioned.

But back to tickets, their prices and their rarity. While I have never found any data to support my suppositions about an important fact to collectors seems well supported based on my many years of studying tickets and myriad other details about the WCe. I'm very certain that if we ever could find records about the use of tickets, I am firmly convinced that those less than a dollar were used dramatically more often than those for $5 or $10. It simply makes sense bsed on the economy. For example, one fact I know quite well is that $5 stand tickets are much rarer than those with a face value of nickels and dimes.

This doesn't mean that automatically a quarter or dollar German Village ticket is valued higher than this ten cent ticket. In selling Columbian tickets going back more than 40 years, I have never sold any denomination German Village ticket for more than another. But that same experience has shown that the high denominations--a $5.00 stand ticket or a $10 Java Village two-part ticket, are rarer than the same concessions' other tickets.

Because the German Village tickets only go up to a dollar, there isn't a sharply defined sense of any one being more valuable than another. In many cases I been able to verifiy how much rarer the $5 and $10 tickets are compared to others. The rarity is simply a product of fewer being printed and fewer being used and thus fewer out there in the marketplace.

I also discovered over the years that many collectors relatively new to WCE tickets were unaware that these concession #7 tickets were from the German Village, since the tickets do not have that information printed on them. I think that the German managers felt that the country's eagle logo was so well known that there was no need to print "German Village" on the ticket. Further, most collectors have not had the good fortune to own or even study the list of concessions published in fair documents that were probably not shared with anyone such as the media, but everything is accessible if one has the perseverance for the search.