A contractor's crew involved in the the $163 million reconstruction of Chicago's South Lake Shore Drive discovered fragments of Germania, a statue built for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition to promote the glories of concrete. Unearthed last fall, the statue pieces were recently identified thanks to the Chicago Park District, which called upon local fair expert, Charles Gregersen, who authenticated the Germania head and other fragments after a two-minute description by phone.

The statue originally was erected by then-Heidelberg Zement, parent company of Pennsylvania-based Lehigh Cement Co., to brag about the German company's mastery of portland cement production, a relatively new technology at the time. Steps, urns, tablets, pavilion and statue were all cast in portland cement concrete, a material that came into widespread use when the tall-building era began, around 1882. The Germania statue — erected by the German firm Manske & Co. — stood atop a large archway that served as one of the entrances to the German section of the fair, at the south end of the fair grounds not far from where fragments were found last fall. Many who saw the archway mistakingly thought it was “fashioned out of limestone of a bluish tint.”

Designed to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America by Columbus, the fair ran for six months, attracted 27,539,000 visitors — almost half the total number of people then living in the United States — and covered more than 650 acres along present-day Jackson Park. When the fair neared the end of its run, much of what was specially constructed for it was slated for demolition. But before wreckers could do so, arsonists in the summer of 1894 set many of the buildings on fire. It was reported at the time that the Germania statue had survived the fire, but Park District officials guess that it was eventually just pushed over, and it became part of the landscape — only to be buried under South Lake Shore Drive when it was built in 1927.

The Chicago Park District hopes to put the pieces — which also include part of a shield, something resembling a bird's talons in addition to the woman's face that matched the keystone in the arches of the statue's base — on display soon in a gazebo near the only structure remaining today from the Columbian Exposition, the Museum of Science and Industry, which in 1893 housed the fair's Palace of Fine Arts.