Fair Park is a public park and exhibition ground in east Dallas, a short distance from the downtown business district, and the home of the State Fair of Texas.¹ The city of Dallas owns the grounds, which its Park and Recreation Department runs jointly with the State Fair of Texas Association.¹ Rebuilt for the Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936, the park holds one of the largest surviving groups of Art Deco and Moderne buildings in the United States, among them the Hall of State.²

Two fairs and a merger

In 1886 Captain William H. Gaston bought eighty acres from the Thomas Lagow and John Grigsby leagues for $16,000 and deeded them to the newly chartered Dallas State Fair and Exposition Association, receiving 140 shares in return; he afterward donated those shares to the fair.¹ That association opened its first fair on October 26, 1886. A rival group, the Texas State Fair, led by C. A. Keating, had opened its own fair a day earlier on part of John Cole’s farm in north Dallas.¹ Both succeeded, with a combined daily attendance above 35,000. The two bodies eventually merged, and the new organization settled on the east Dallas tract as the permanent site.¹ The first fairs came some forty five years after John Neely Bryan settled at the Trinity crossing in November 1841.³

A change of name in 1899 made the organization simply the Texas State Fair. It was already in financial trouble when the exposition buildings burned in 1902, and it lost its largest source of income when the legislature outlawed betting on horse races.¹ The directors turned down $125,000 for the property, which would have become a residential subdivision, and in 1904 offered it to the city as a park. In exchange the city covered the association’s debts, while the fair board went on staging the yearly exhibition and paid Dallas a share of its receipts.¹ The fair’s years on this footing are traced in the essay on Fair Park before the Centennial.

The Texas Centennial Exposition

A group of Dallas businessmen incorporated as the Texas Centennial Central Exposition Corporation won the state’s centennial celebration for the city over San Antonio, Austin and Houston. Dallas offered the existing fairgrounds and buildings, more land to bring the site to 180 acres, and a guarantee of $5.5 million in public and private money.¹ The bidding is the subject of How Dallas Won the Centennial.

George L. Dahl of Greene, LaRoche, and Dahl served as chief architect and technical director. Work began in October 1935, and the $25 million exposition opened on June 6, 1936; twenty one of its fifty buildings were built to last.¹ Every plan needed Dahl’s approval. He called his style “Texanic”: broad, low buildings with smooth walls, bold murals and large sculpture.¹ The main gate stayed where earlier fairs had placed it and opened onto an esplanade lined with exhibit halls. The Agriculture Complex and the Civic Center, a museum group the city built around a man made lagoon, still stand, as do buildings put up by Magnolia Oil Company, Lone Star Gas and Continental Oil. The federal government built a Federal Building and a Hall of Negro Life.¹

The Hall of State

The Hall of State stands at the far end of the esplanade.¹ The state built it in 1936 at a cost near $1.2 million, to designs by a group of eleven Texas architects, in a T shaped plan faced with Texas limestone.⁴ Its front wing holds the Hall of Heroes, with Pompeo Coppini’s bronze figures of six founders of the Texas Republic, and four rooms devoted to the regions of the state. The Great Hall carries murals by Eugene Savage.⁴⁵ Dallas held the building on a lease from the state until it took title in 1976. Since 1938 the building has been run by the society described in the Dallas Historical Society entry.⁴⁵

Later history

After nearly fifty years of neglect, the city began improvements in 1985, and a support group, Friends of Fair Park, formed to keep restoration going.¹ The Historic American Buildings Survey recorded the park in 1986, counting some thirty structures on 277 acres dating from the 1936 exposition and its sequel of 1937. The park was designated a National Historic Landmark in September 1986.² The African American Museum opened on the grounds in 1993, the same year renovations to the Cotton Bowl were completed.¹ Other entries on Dallas places appear in the reference section.

References

Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Fair Park ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴
Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey, Fair Park, Perry and Second Avenues, Dallas, Dallas County, TX ↩ ↩²
Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Bryan, John Neely ↩
Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Hall of State ↩ ↩² ↩³
Dallas Historical Society, The Hall of State ↩ ↩²