DWC-DQ ~ Part II ~ An Awful Fight

I'm struggling to make myself read this book because I really, really, really don't want to read the parts about Holmes. Therefore, these questions all relate to preparing for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. If somebuddy can come up with questions relating to Holmes, I invite you to do so.

In part II I got board with all the construction talk and started anxiously anticipating Holmes’s next devious act. I do have to remind myself that this is NOT fiction and these things really happened. I am holding my breath each chapter to see if he is caught.

3. Did you notice the "water wars"? Because Georgia is currently engaged in what some are calling a "water war" with Tennessee (and because I live in Chattanooga, on the border between the two states), I noticed Burnham's concern about providing clean water to the fair. Georgia's problem is rapid expansion without planning ahead for the water needs of its people; Burnham's problem was sewage threatening Chicago's water supply. Read the section spanning pages 175-176 about the fight to pipe water from Waukesha, Wisconsin, to the fair in Jackson Park. What was the subtle distinction that allowed Burnham to say the water came from Waukesha?

I thought they (Georgia) were going to get water from Alabama. We have had a water restriction every summer since I can remember.
I thought McElroy was pretty ingenious in his idea to re-route his water supply.

4. A tiny (four sentence) section at the top of page 181 mentions a pledge recited by school children on Dedication Day. I'd never heard that this was how the Pledge of Allegiance began, had you? Who was Francis J. Bellamy, anyway? (You may have to google or go to Wikipedia to learn more about him. In my research, I discovered that I was two years old when the U.S. Congress recognized the Pledge as the official national pledge.)

I didn’t know this either. According to Wikipedia, Francis Julius Bellamy (May 18, 1855 - August 28, 1931) was an American Baptist minister and Christian Socialist.


5. The original Ferris Wheel was bigger than I realized, at "a bit higher than the crown of the ... Statue of Liberty" (p. 185). I'm sure we'll read more about it in later sections of the book, but say something about the size of the thirty-six "cars" on the Ferris Wheel.

WOW! I had no idea. It's hare to imagine it, even today 115 years later.