April 30, 1904
On this day in 1904, the World’s Fair in St. Louis opened with one of its major attractions still trying to get himself together. City leaders in Birmingham hustled to get the 56-foot-tall statue designed and cast in time, but didn’t make opening day.
Weighing 60 tons, the parts of Vulcan were shipped to Missouri from the middle of April until the middle of May. The statue was finished and dedicated on June 7, and was actually christened with water from the Cahaba River.
Vulcan won a Grand Prize at the exhibition, and both St. Louis and San Francisco made efforts to buy the statue. Instead, it was disassembled in February 1905, where the parts were dropped off in Birmingham while competing city groups squabbled over where it should make its home. More than three decades passed before Vulcan found a home on his current perch on Red Mountain.
Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.
Sculptor Giuseppe Moretti, center, and a group of workmen pose before the lower right leg of the statue of Vulcan in 1904, the year it was displayed at the St. Louis World’s Fair. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, courtesy of Birmingham Public Library Archives)
Giuseppe Moretti’s Vulcan statue stands amid other displays in the Palace of Mines and Metallurgy at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. It earned silver medals for Moretti, its creator, and iron and steel manufacturers James R. McWane and J.A. MacKnight, who commissioned the monumental sculpture. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, courtesy of the A.S. Williams III Americana Collection. The University of Alabama Libraries)
Colossal iron statue of Vulcan, in the Mines Building, St. Louis World’s Fair, c. 1904. (Underwood & Underwood, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
Panorama of the World’s Fair, St. Louis, 1904. (George W. Melville, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
Vulcan Statue & Park, 1996. (Richard K. Anderson Jr., Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
This photograph shows how the Vulcan statue looked prior to the 1999–2004 restoration. (Druid85, Wikipedia)
For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.