History

The Texas Centennial of 1936 was the largest world’s fair held in the South up to that point: a deliberate effort by the State of Texas, the city of Dallas, and a coalition of corporate sponsors to present Texas at the moment of its centennial independence from Mexico as a modern, prosperous, and culturally ambitious place. The exposition was sited at Fair Park, an existing fairgrounds east of downtown Dallas, which was comprehensively rebuilt in the Art Deco style for the occasion. Virtually all the buildings constructed for the exposition have survived, making Fair Park the largest intact collection of Depression-era Art Deco architecture in the United States.

The Hall of State was conceived as the apex of the exposition’s architectural hierarchy: the building at the head of the formal esplanade that structured the entire fair. The programme demanded a building that was simultaneously a history museum, an exhibition hall, and a symbol of Texas civic identity. The Art Deco vocabulary—monumental scale, geometric ornament, heroic reliefs, gilded interiors—was well suited to this brief, and the Texas Centennial architects applied it with a local inflection: the bas-relief sculptures on the facade depict Texas heroes and allegories of the state’s history and geography, while the interior murals trace the four centuries of European and American presence in the territory.

The State Fair of Texas has been held at Fair Park every October since 1886 (with interruptions during the world wars), and the Hall of State has served as the visual and symbolic anchor of the fair throughout the postwar period. The Dallas Historical Society has operated it as a history museum since the late twentieth century, maintaining the original murals, reliefs, and decorative programme largely intact.