The legislature of Connecticut appropriated $100,000 for the participation of that State at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.  The following commissioners were appointed by the governor of Connecticut, according to an act of the legislature passed April 2, 1903: 

Frank L. Wilcox, president:  Charles Phelps, vice-president; J.A.  Vail, secretary-treasurer; Edgar J. Dolittle, Isaac W. Birdseye, Phelps Montgomery, Mrs. Louis R. Cheney, Mrs. George H. Knight, Miss Anne H. Chappell.  National commissioners:  Frederick Betts, Mrs. John M. Holcombe.  Resident commissioner, Hobart Brinsmade.

The Connecticut State Building was intended to represent colonial design.  In its main exterior features it was a replica of the Sigourney mansion in Hartford, built about 1820 by Charles Sigourney, whose wife Lydia Huntley Sigourney, was highly regarded as a poet in her time.  In later years it was the home of Lieut.  Governor Julius Catlin.  The architect of the Connecticut building was Edward T. Hapgood, of Hartford.  The interior plan was designed to combine colonial ideas with modern requirements, which were carried out to such extent as to make it one of the most attractive and homelike structures on the exposition grounds.  It was erected by The H. Wales Lines Company, of Meriden, Conn., at a cost of about $31,000, and official inspectors pronounced it the best-built edifice at the exposition.  The walls of the rooms on the first floor and the upper hall were hung with five different designs of exquisite silk tapestry, the gift of the Cheney Brothers, of South Manchester.  These added a “finishing touch” that found no comparison elsewhere on the grounds.  The furnishing of the building was in excellent harmony with its colonial design.  Highboys and lowboys, Chippendale, Hepplewhite and Windsor chairs, Sheraton and thousand-legged tables, flax wheels and warming pans were associated with canopied high-post bedsteads, while corner cupboards revealed rare copper-luster china of almost untold value.  As a colonial exhibit it was unique, and had it been entered in competition for reward would most surely have been given the grand prize.  The souvenir catalogue issued by the Connecticut commission contains a list of 514 articles, most of them loaned from various Connecticut homesteads.  The catalogue also contains a list of oil paintings and water colors, all by Connecticut artists, which embellished the walls of the building, the selection being made by Charles Noel Flagg, of Hartford, chosen by the commission for that service.

The collective exhibits of Connecticut were in the following-named departments:  Education, farm products, tobacco, dairy, horticulture (including pomology), herbarium, public parks and residential grounds (photographs), and shellfish.  The grounds surrounding the Connecticut Building form part of the State horticultural exhibit.

On account of the limited appropriation it was necessary to abandon the live exhibit of Connecticut in the Fish and Game Building.  With the limited amount of stock which the oystermen had, owing to the lack of “set” for a number of years, they considered it a detriment to advertise, and it was only through a regard for the commission that any of the larger cultivators would contribute to the exhibit.