Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition - Legacy

Legacy

Very little of the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition remains today. The vast majority of the structures were designed to be temporary, and were torn down the following year, in 1906. A few structures were moved elsewhere and remained in use for a long time, most famously the Forestry Building, which was reinforced with a concrete foundation and converted into a forestry museum. It burned to the ground in 1964. A replacement museum was built in Portland's Washington Park and is today known as the World Forestry Center. A few buildings from the fair remain standing today, including the Fairmount Hotel, the American Inn, and the NCR Building (now the McMenamins St. Johns Theater and Pub).

Guild's Lake, a cutoff meander of the Willamette River around which the fairgrounds were built, was slowly filled in by industrial developers (and the Port of Portland) in the years after the fair; by the 1920s the lake had vanished entirely. Over the years, the grounds have been used for a garbage incinerator, a landfill, a rail switching yard, wartime housing, and warehouses. Today the ground formerly occupied by the lake (and the fairgrounds itself) is still used for primarily industrial purposes, and has been designated an Industrial Sanctuary by the City of Portland.