Oregon built a Parthenon out of its forests. The architects, Foulkes and Hogue of San Francisco and Portland, relied on the tradition that the first Parthenon had been built of wood long before Pericles. Their colonnade was 48 Douglas-fir logs with the bark on, one for each state in the Union, each five to six and a half feet thick, 42 feet high and weighing about 20 tons. The building stood on a platform about 150 by 250 feet. At its Halloween housewarming in 1914, according to the Official Guide, committees from the state societies each took formal possession of a column.
Inside were fruit, grain and dairy exhibits, strawberries growing, a picture theater, and an all-Oregon art room paneled in cedar, with furniture of myrtlewood. Young women students of the Oregon Agricultural College prepared a 75-cent course luncheon. North of the building an aviary 150 feet long and fish pools modeled on reaches of the Columbia River ran toward the bay. Nearby rose the Astoria flagpole, a single tree 214 feet above the ground, floated down the coast to the fair.
It was a Parthenon with the bark on; for it is architectural tradition that long before the age of Pericles, the original Parthenon was a wooden structure...
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 3, p. 331 (1921)
