The fair symbolizes progress and education. As Chicago’s mayor says in a closing ceremony, the fair was “the greatest educator of the nineteenth century” (136). When the fair is first introduced to the reader, in Aunt Euterpe letter, she presents it as a chance to see the world. Its grand pavilions showcase technological advances in areas such as machinery, agriculture, and mining and present art exhibits and educational lectures. In the course of the novel, the family manages to work its way through most or all of these presentations, “picking the fair clean” (122).

It is both a catalyst and a symbolic parallel for Rosie’s increasing maturity and future adult life. She comes to it as a green country girl and leaves it as someone with purpose and knowledge of the world, the word she frequently uses to describe the fair. When she is overwhelmed by her first glimpse of the pavilions at night, she says, “It was too much world for me” (63). Resisting the urge to question Lottie about the invitation to the Danforth Evanses, she thinks, “Now I’d been to the fair […] I was not yet a woman of the world, but I had a toe in the door” (125).