For three weeks in late spring of 1925, crowds gathered at a park in Springfield, Missouri, to witness a strange sight. It was neither a fair nor a circus. It was an entire city, but in miniature. According to historian Joseph Nathan Kane's reference work Famous First Facts, about 10,000 schoolchildren built 1,200 miniature structures on a five-acre lot at Grant Beach Park that year. It is one of the stranger chapters in American school history, and it shows how far a city would go to persuade people to buy homes.
A city that fit in a park
