The Wisconsin State Capitol

Posted on August 8, 2023 by admin

When I visited the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison in late July, I didn’t see this building.

Rather, I saw this one, late in the afternoon of the first day of my drive.

The beaux-arts capitol is actually Wisconsin’s fourth, replacing the one pictured in the postcard, which burned down in early 1904. The state tasked George B. Post to design a new structure, which took a while to complete, finally being finished in 1917. Post was known for late 19th-century mansions – paid for by robber barons who wanted to show off – but he also did other elaborate buildings, such as the New York Stock Exchange.

The gilded bronze on the top of the dome is yet another Daniel Chester French work, “Wisconsin.” French was a prolific fellow.

Like the Tiffany Bridge, this wasn’t my first visit to the capitol. That would have been sometime in the late 1980s. Wisconsin is, however, one of the few capitols, along with Texas and Illinois, that I’ve visited more than once.

So this visit didn’t change my vanity map of capitols, but I thought I’d update it anyway (green for interior visits, orange-pink for exteriors only, Hawaii gold because I don’t remember, but I might have seen it).

Lilly and I spent some time in the Wisconsin capitol during a December 2016 visit to Madison. It was cold that day, naturally, and visiting was a relief from the chilly air. This time the building interior was a relief because the day was hot and sticky. Besides, who doesn’t enjoy a view inside the dome?

The interior is as resplendent as the exterior. Badgers were in a few prominent places.

Those paintings are allegories. Liberty in this case, but also Justice, Government and Legislation, on the other three corners.

This capitol doesn’t feature a lot of statuary, unlike some, but there is a bust of Robert M. La Follette, no doubt considered a Wisconsinite among Wisconsinites.

I like these pics of him, lifted from Wikipedia. Fighting Bob all right.

The Assembly chamber was closed, but I could still see Old Abe through the window. He looks down on the legislators, presumably reminding them to do their duty.

I’ve seen Old Abe depicted before: on a tractor and a memorial at Vicksburg. Another Wisconsinite among Wisconsinites: He was the mascot of the 8th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment from 1861 to ’64.

“The regiment procured a large, shield-shaped mount and perch to carry the eagle,” says Atlas Obscura. “Old Abe witnessed all of the regiment’s battles. He was taken into combat with the regimental colors… Old Abe participated in 37 battles and skirmishes. The regiment mustered out of service in 1864. On September 26, 1864, his army comrades returned Old Abe to Wisconsin and gifted him to the people of the state.”

When the bird died in 1881, he was stuffed and put on display at the capitol – the one that burned down in 1904, reducing Old Abe to ashes. The one you can see now is another stuffed eagle, doing homage to the mascot. I didn’t remember seeing him on previous visits, but now I have. Huzzah for Old Abe.

The Ohio Statehouse

Posted on April 12, 2023 by admin

Through much of 1999, I visited a fair number of Midwestern cities on editorial business of one kind or another. At some point, that included Columbus, Ohio. I was staying downtown, so during a lull, I popped over to the Ohio Statehouse, which occupies a prominent 10-acre block.

I went in and looked around back then, but thinking about it last month, what I remembered most was the statue of William McKinley near the street. He’s still there, of course.

With verbiage about the immortal memory of President McKinley. That’s what I remembered, how memorials speak to those who already remember, at least among Americans. Later generations do not remember, or much care, except in certain lightning-rod cases. I suppose that isn’t a good thing, but there is the upside of mostly forgetting to hold historical grudges.

The president isn’t alone at that part of the capitol grounds, with some bronze allegories to keep him company.

The back entrance.

We’re used to seeing a dome on such a structure, but state capitols mostly started using that form, patterned after the current shape of the U.S. capitol, after that building took shape in the 1860s. The Ohio Statehouse is older than that.

We arrived late in the morning of March 25, the last day of the trip, after spending the night in suburban Columbus. I would have similar shots of the front, but as innocently spring-like as the pictures seem to be, there was a wicked strong wind blowing. Not terribly cold, just incessant and sometimes so energetic that you could feel yourself tipping one way or another, especially as a gust passed without warning.

Much calmer inside. Under the rotunda.

Nice detail work. I’m impressed by the Spirograph floor. The Spirograph-ish spirit of democracy, maybe.

The design is much less spare than in West Virginia, but not the work of any single designer. It’s the Greek Revival creation of a series of architects beginning in the 1830s and not finished until 1861, just as the nation fell apart.

Perry, hero of Lake Erie, isn’t forgotten. Not at least on the wall.

Nor Vicksburg. Many Ohioans were there.

Nor Cleisthenes, ancient democratic reformer.

I can’t say I’ve ever seen him at a capitol before, and he isn’t known as a native of Ohio, but it’s a good choice. No less than Herodotus called him “the man who introduced the tribes and the democracy” to Athens, “tribes” being the 10 groups organized by residence in Attica, rather than clan or other kinship.

The seal of Ohio in glass.

The visitor entrance, and the information desk, closed gift store and some museum exhibits, are in the basement, itself fairly handsome.

I didn’t know who founded the 4-H Program. Now I do, but sadly I am likely to forget.

I like this a lot: the counties of Ohio, each in a different stone.

Finally, words of wisdom –

Not because Lincoln had a special connection to Ohio or the building. Just, I think, on general principles.

The West Virginia Capitol

Posted on April 11, 2023 by admin

But for an unfortunate fire a little more than 100 years ago, you might see this when you visit the West Virginia Capitol in Charleston.

In history as it was, there was a fire, and West Virginia needed a new capitol, which was completed by 1932. Nice job. Design by none other than Cass Gilbert, whose body of work is astonishing.

“Like the predecessor capitols Gilbert designed for Minnesota and Arkansas, the West Virginia capitol is dominated by its dome, which rises 292 feet above a colonnaded drum, and is embossed with gold leaf,” says the Cass Gilbert Society.

“The design was inspired by that of the Pantheon in Paris. The main entrances to the building are through monumental pedimented Corinthian porticos, set below the dome. Shallow domes at the ends of the main capitol block mark the location of the legislative chambers. The interior walls are faced with Vermont marble. The floor of the rotunda below the main dome is of Italian and Vermont marble.”

We stopped in Charleston on our way out of West Virginia on March 24. The warm, sunny weather of the day before had disappeared into rain and cold wind, as happens in the spring. So a walkabout outside the capitol wouldn’t have been pleasant. As I pointed my camera at the capitol, I had to brush water off.

Inside was another matter, nice and dry. A spare but impressive design, owing more than a little to Greek temples.

Gold leaf outside the dome. Inside, coal black. At least, that’s what I see. Incidentally, the neoclassical West Virginia capitol dome is the last of its kind among U.S. capitols — or, put another way, the most recent one.

The West Virginia House of Delegates.

The seats were roped off, but you can get close enough to some of the backbenches – literally at the back – to take in some interesting detail. Nothing surprising is a U.S. flag or a cross or even a Don’t Tread On Me flag or what I take to be some coal – but what’s that earth-colored disk?

Does that particular delegate sympathize with flat-earthers? Seems unlikely. Also, if you look carefully at the wider shot of the House of Delegates, those blue disks seem to be on some, but not all of the desks. A sizable minority of the delegates are flat-earthers? No, I won’t assume it. People believe the damnedest things, or say they do, but even now that would be too far around the bend. Still, I wonder what that disk is supposed to mean, in its pride of place on the desks.

There isn’t a lot of statuary, but West Virginia could hardly forget Sen. Byrd, here in a Solonian pose.

Or that western Virginian, Stonewall Jackson. He didn’t quite live long enough to hear about the formation of West Virginia, though the estrangement of western Virginia was well underway in his lifetime. He probably had other things on his mind, anyway.

He doesn’t have a statue, but JFK rates a memorial.

A president, paying attention to West Virginia! Of course, it probably helped that the state was solidly Democratic in those days, but with a political history of more swinging than most of the states to its south.

Like many capitols, portraits of old ‘n’ moldy governors hang on the walls (and sometimes not so old). Here’s the first governor of West Virginia, Arthur I. Boreman, with that distinctly mid-century vibe (mid-19th century, that is), and Lincolnesque beard. Probably no accident.

Boreman pushed for the establishment of West Virginia, which by itself ought to be better known. After all, it was the only successful secession of the Civil War era.

Another gov: number three, William E. Stevenson, another member of the founding generation of West Virginians, which aligned with his pro-Union and anti-slavery convictions.

That’s a striking portrait, unusual among governors long gone but still hanging on the wall. Wonder if the artist took liberties, or whether the governor actually had movie-star good looks well before anyone saw any movies.

Tri-State Appalachian Equinox Road Trip

Posted on March 26, 2023 by admin

Old Chinese proverb, I’ve heard: even a journey of 1,000 leagues begins by backing out of the driveway. That we did on Friday, March 17. We pulled back into the driveway on Saturday, March 25. In between we traveled 2,219 miles, using the ragged marvel that is the system of roads in the United States.

My fanciful name for the trip refers to three states that were the focus: Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. We actually passed through seven states, also including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and very briefly, Maryland.

We saw a lot of places, but two in particular motivated the trip as a whole. One was Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright sculpture – I mean, house – perched over an irregular drop on Bear Run, a creek in rural Pennsylvania. Visiting Fallingwater had long been an ambition of Yuriko’s, maybe since before she lived in this country, since FLW is known far and wide; but I needed no persuasion to go myself.

The other was New River Gorge National Park and Preserve in eastern-ish West Virginia. This was my suggestion, since I keep up on national parks. But I’ve wanted to go there a good while, long before Congress promoted it to national park, which only happened in 2020. Besides, it was high time I spent a little more than a few minutes in West Virginia which, for whatever else it has, is known for its surpassing scenery. This reputation, I can confirm, is deserved.

Weather-wise, spring travel is a crap shoot. The day we left a cold, unpleasant wind blew in Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, and it followed us under the same gray skies and at temps barely above freezing the next day, into central Ohio.

By last Monday, in southwest Pennsylvania, temps had moderated with the appearance of the sun, and each day was more pleasant than the last as we headed south into West Virginia, where the grass had greened and some bushes had too, though most trees were at the barely budding stage. Thursday, March 23 proved best of all, with sunny skies and temps in the 70s, allowing us to enjoy the best meal of our trip — ricebowl meals — at a picnic table in Fayetteville, W.Va.

A cold rain came calling on Friday as we headed from West Virginia back to Ohio. On Saturday, again in central Ohio, it wasn’t bitterly cold, but the wind was so strong at times that it jostled my car as I drove and my body as I walked. Rain squalls came and went, with a spell of sleet I actually enjoyed, sitting in our parked car listening, knowing that the ice was too small to do any damage. Returning home yesterday, Illinois was pretty much as we’d left it, chilly and not-quite-spring.

The upshot of it all is to pack for the weather variety you’re going to encounter, and I was more than glad – as I returned to the car in a stiff wind, crossing a green field in small-town Ohio, feeling wind chill that must have been around zero (and I mean Fahrenheit) – that I’d brought the coat I use most of the winter.

We brought the dog. We don’t want to leave her at a kennel any more, and no one was at home to mind her. Having your dog along is something like traveling with a small child you can’t take into restaurants or a lot of other places, but we don’t regret a bit of it. Long drives in the car don’t faze her at all, since after the first few minutes, that’s like lying around the house and, as the comedian said, a dog’s job is lying around the house.

She had her energetic moments too, more than you’d think for an ancient dog, such as walking the trail to Diamond Point overlooking the New River Gorge, with its smooth straightaways through forests giving way to patches of mud, large rocks or tightly packed tree roots underfoot, sometimes all of those in a single stretch. Our reward for the sometime-slog was a vista of rare beauty. Her reward? I don’t think it was anything so visual. Maybe following the pack is its own reward for her.

Companion dogs also mean you acquaint yourself with the look and feel of the front office and main entrance of limited-service hotels during the empty early a.m. hours, well lit as a Broadway stage but without any players. Except maybe for the night clerk, just outside the door, who is peering into his phone, cigarette in other hand. Probably our dog, as any dog, could be trained to pee on a disposable rug in the room during the small hours, but somehow we’ve never wanted to do that. There’s something appealing somehow about the ritual of dressing as simply as possible a few minutes after waking at 2:30 or 3, or 25 or 6 to 4, hitching a leash to the dog’s collar and repairing to the first patch of green, or pebbles ringed by a curb, outside the hotel door

Take me home, country roads. I’ll say this for West Virginia, it’s got some crazy-ass serpentine roads through its ancient and forested mountains. The Laurel Highlands in southwest Pennsylvania was no piker in that regard, either. You need to keep an intense focus on the road as it winds this way and that, rises and falls, and passes ever so close to boulder walls, massive trees and wicked ditches. If you don’t mind thinking about your mortality every now and then, that’s some good driving.

Mostly good driving. There are moments when a red sedan, or a black pickup truck, decides that tailgating you at roughly the speed limit as you wind around and navigate switchbacks, is a good idea, and blasts around you at the first marginal opportunity, double solid stripes be damned.

Yet I only got the smallest sampling of the twisty roads. No roads without pavement this trip, though plenty enough didn’t bother with details such as guardrails. Another, entirely unpaved and mostly unregulated network of roads and tracks, many perhaps pre-New Deal, must exist in West Virginia. Out away from the nearest town, while we were parked a national park site on a small paved road, three ATVs buzzed past, each with two people. They were headed toward town after emerging from the woods, their vehicles streaked with mud. I was just close enough to see in their faces they’d had a fine time out in the unpaved network.

Also, if you really wanted to get home to West Virginia, wouldn’t you take the Interstate?

We made stops in Ohio going and coming.

On Saturday, March 18 we made our way south from Ann Arbor, where we’d spent the first night, to Columbus, Ohio, to spent the second. On the way is the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, a Byzantine edifice rising in a small town, which we visited, but also sites associated with Warren G. Harding: his memorial and burial site, and also his home, in the large town of Marion, Ohio.

Our return home, beginning on Friday, March 24, took us back through Ohio, to Columbus for the last night of the trip. Saturday morning, after takeout breakfast at Tim Horton’s – for that part of Ohio is in the Tim Horton’s orb, we were glad to learn – we visited downtown Columbus and the Ohio Statehouse in a howling cool wind. Ate lunch, Korean-style chicken and salad, sitting in the car in a clearly gentrified neighborhood, the bricked-streeted German Village. We spent the rest of Saturday driving back, via Indianapolis.

On the morning of Sunday, March 19, we left Columbus and made our way east through the remarkable town of Newark, Ohio, then Wheeling and Moundsville, West Virginia and from there to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, a mid-sized far outer suburb of Pittsburgh. Or at least it will be in a few years.

On Monday, we paid our visit to Fallingwater, taking turns on tours, after which we had lunch in a low-season tourist town and took an impediment-rich hike in Ohiopyle State Park, along the rocky shore of the Youghiogheny River, at that point boasting a highly picturesque waterfall. That was enough for one day for Yuriko, who napped in the car (along with the dog) as I walked the much shorter and smoother path to Fort Necessity National Battlefield late that afternoon.

On Tuesday, we made our way back west a short distance, to visit the Palace of Gold in rural West Virginia, in the peculiar north panhandle of the state (which I’ve long thought of as a conning tower). We returned that day to Uniontown by way of Moundsville, W. Va., home of an ancient mound of remarkable height, a former penitentiary of remarkable solidity, and a bridge across the Ohio River of remarkable elegance. Those things, and some tasty if not remarkable barbecue.

The next day, we left for West Virginia, but not by the most direct route, because I wanted to see the Flight 93 National Memorial in deep rural Pennsylvania. Progressively smaller roads lead there, including – as we traveled it, which I figured would be the quickest route – a short stretch of I-68 through the oddity that is the Maryland panhandle. Late that day, Wednesday, we arrived in Beckley, W. Va.

We spent almost all of Thursday at the national park, at one sight or another, driving and hiking and pondering historic and sometimes crumbled structures. But that wasn’t quite enough. On Friday morning, before we left for Ohio, we went back to the park. Around noon, we headed west, passing through Charleston long enough to visit the West Virginia State Capitol and eat Chinese takeout, though not at the same time. A little north of Charleston, we crossed back into Ohio after gassing up near the small town of Ripley, West Virginia. Believe it or not.

One other thing: this was a vacation from the news, which following is part of my job. Except for the briefest snippets on the radio, when sometimes I didn’t change stations out of habit for some seconds, I ignored the news of the world, or even smaller parts of it. I think that’s a good thing to do.

But of course, a few things got through. I heard the opening bars of The Dick Van Dyke Show theme on a news program one day, and I jumped to the conclusion that he had died. That isn’t a big jump, since he’s 97. But no, merely a one-car accident.

Image being that well regarded, that your minor auto accident as a nonagenarian is national news. Anyway, glad not to say, RIP, Dick Van Dyke.

The Georgia State Capitol

Posted on November 8, 2022 by admin

It’s been a good year for visiting U.S. capitols. Four all together: Utah, Nevada, California and most recently, Georgia. I believe that makes about 40 exteriors over the years, about 30 of which I’ve ventured inside, and not counting two provincial parliaments in Canada. Not sure about a few of those, because memory is an uncertain thing.

The Georgia State Capitol is in the thick of downtown. It has an impressive dome.

The painted copper statue that looks so small from the ground is known as Miss Freedom, dating from 1889, only a year after the capitol was completed. It’s about 26 feet tall, weighs over 1600 lbs. and is wearing a Phrygian cap, a detail one has to read about to know.

Fittingly, gold leaf from near Dahlonega, Georgia, adorns the dome. One of these days, I need to visit that place, to take in the historic mint. I’d toyed with the idea this time, but stuck around Atlanta instead during the day or so after the conference. The capitol was the first place I went when I had some free time.

The legislature isn’t in session now, and besides, a capitol is an office building — and a lot of people don’t work as much as they used to in offices. So the place was practically deserted. I wandered around the quiet marble halls, a design by Willoughby J. Edbrooke and Franklin Pierce Burnham of Chicago, no less.

The rotunda. Plain, but still worth a look.

The chambers. Closed, but with nice big windows to peer through.

The capitol also has a museum aspect to it, as many capitols do. Including something I’d never seen before in any capitol. Or anywhere that I can remember. A two-headed calf.

The unfortunate beast was born in Palmetto, Georgia in 1987, a nearby sign said. Other curiosities were on display at the capitol, too, but none quite so curious.

Or maybe this is.

It took me moment to realize it was Jimmy Carter, as governor. That isn’t quite the face the nation outside Georgia got to know in the late ’70s. Also, it’s odd that there’s no mention that Gov. Carter went on to, you know, some other office. Even the California capitol acknowledged that Ronald Reagan was more than governor for a spell.

Besides Jimmy, there’s a decided mix of other historic personages on display, some too famous to need naming. A chronological posting:

Interesting, but I was more delighted to find Button Gwinnett. Not only has this been a year for visiting capitols, but for Button sites too.

“Brief but brilliant was the career of Button Gwinnett, Revolutionary Patriot,” the bust says, emphasis on brief.

Guess I need to visit the Button Gwinnett House someday, to really be a complete Button tourist. Or was it really his house?

The California State Capitol

Posted on October 31, 2022 by admin

Halloween looked the part this afternoon: cool and misty, almost clammy. By dark, 22 kids had come by. Twenty-two in ’22. We gave away full-sized candy bars.

This isn’t the California State Capitol.

Such is the zeitgeist that someone, somewhere could claim that it is, and that nefarious persons — lizard people, even — are up to no good inside, and it would have some chance of being believed, at least by a fraction of the population.

I won’t be that person. That’s the Golden 1 Center. It happens to be in Sacramento too, and I happened to see it. I will say that it has some interesting detail.

Design by AECOM and Mark Dziewulski Architect, the arena was completed only in 2016 and is home of the Sacramento Kings, a team originally formed 99 years ago as the Rochester Seagrams. The development of Golden 1 Center was a “long-running and convoluted… drama,” according to the Sacramento Bee.

Anyway, this is the state capitol of California. It has interesting detail of its own.

San Francisco architect Reuben S. Clark, clearly inspired by the U.S. Capitol, designed the building, which was constructed between 1861 and ’74. Sacramento had been state capital since 1854, apparently picked as a midway point between where the action was in early U.S. California, namely the Sierra Nevada gold fields to the east and the port of San Francisco to the west.

The building is currently undergoing renovation. The park behind the capitol, which takes up many whole city blocks, was entirely closed off by a temporary wall (ah, that’s where the lizard people are scheming).

Too bad. I hear it’s quite a park. But Lilly and I could get into the capitol itself, via a temporary covered walkway through a construction site, and through metal detectors.

If there’s a rotunda, the thing to do is look up at it.

State capitols tend to feature portraits of governors, and California is no different. Some are more recognizable than others, though I imagine even Arnold’s fame will fade over the coming decades.

On the other hand, Minerva isn’t likely to fade from her fame among classicists, eccentrics and a few schoolchildren.

Minerva and not Athena because the signs with this depiction of state seal (mounted in the capitol) called her Minerva, and besides, Athena has been associated with another place for thousands of years.

A few other details about the seal. The bear is a California grizzly which, despite being important to California symbolism, was hunted to extinction. There are 31 stars, the state being the 31st to join the union. A miner toils for gold, and ships connect California to the rest of the world in the early days.

Why Minerva? She was born fully an adult from Jupiter’s brow. As for California, it was born fully a state, skipping territorial status.

Carson City & The Nevada State Capitol

Posted on October 23, 2022 by admin

When visiting a place like Carson City, Nevada, you wonder how many other places are named after Kit Carson. That’s the kind of fleeting question that occurs to me, anyway, and sometimes I remember to look it up later.

I like the conciseness of Britannica on the matter, though it’s short on facts: “Carson’s name is preserved variously throughout the Southwest, including Nevada’s capital at Carson City; Fort Carson, Colorado; and Carson Pass in California.”

The National Park Service has naught to say about the mountain man’s naming legacy, so of course the place to go is Wikipedia. All easily checked facts, grouped in one place.

“Carson National Forest in New Mexico was named for him, as well as a county and a town in Colorado. A river and valley in Nevada are named for Carson as well as the state’s capital, Carson City. The Carson Plain in southwest Arizona was named for him.

“Kit Carson Peak, Colorado in the Sangre de Cristo range, Kit Carson Mesa in Colfax County, New Mexico, and Carson Pass in Alpine county, California, were named for him.

“Fort Carson, Colorado, an army post near Colorado Springs, was named after him during World War II by the popular vote of the men training there… Innumerable streets, businesses, and lesser geographical features were given his name.”

Apparently, so was Kit Carson Park in Taos, NM, and a recent move to change it was defeated for interesting reasons.

In Carson City, you can see the bronze Kit. He passed this way in the early 1840s, when he was guiding John C. Fremont.

The inscription: 1843-44, Kit Carson by Buckeye Blake, Commissioned by Truett and Eula Loftin. The Loftins, former casino owners in Carson City, donated the work to the state in 1989.

The statue is on the grounds of the Nevada state capitol, along with an unusual plaque imparting geographic information about Carson’s visits to the future state of Nevada.

Nearby is a man without any national fame, Abraham Curry.

His nickname locally is the “Father of Carson City.” Kit might have passed this way, but Curry stayed. Among many other things, he gave the state the 10 acres on which the capitol stands.

The capitol is a handsome structure, and wouldn’t look out of place as a county courthouse back east. If it were behind scaffolding.

The landscaping is unusual for a capitol, which tend to be clear of trees. Not so for Nevada.

Designed by Joseph Gosling of San Francisco, who is known for a scattering of works. The capitol, completed in 1871, wasn’t always surrounded by trees, such as about 150 years ago.

Inside, no metal detectors, though there is a uniformed officer at the desk. There’s also a bronze of Sara Winnemucca Hopkins.

There are a few of the design elements you see in U.S. capitols, but on the whole the capitol is restrained.

One space is given over to museum exhibits.

Featuring a number of artifacts you aren’t likely to see anywhere else.

This is Guy Shipler (1913-96), once dean of the capitol press corps. Good to see a journalist honored.

The capitol is on N. Carson St. I took a stroll down that street and a couple of connecting streets. A number of state buildings cluster around Carson St. These days, this building houses the Nevada Department of Tourism.

Dating from 1891 as a federal edifice, it has variously been home to the Carson City Post Office, Land Office, Weather Bureau and U.S. District Court.

A few other Carson City buildings pleasing to the eye.

The Nevada State Museum includes this building, the former Carson City Mint. It was closed for Monday.

It’s important (to me) to list the coin types made there from 1870 to ’93. In silver: Seated Liberty dimes, 20-cent pieces, Seated Liberty quarters, half dollars, and dollars, Trade dollars and Morgan dollars. In gold: Half Eagles, Eagles and Double Eagles.

The Utah State Capitol

Posted on June 7, 2022 by admin

Back in August 2011, I wrote: “Among the National Statuary Hall Collection — each state gets to place two, except Virginia, which gets an extra one for Washington — I spied Ronald Reagan, Jack Swigert, Caesar Rodney, Kamehameha I, Dwight Eisenhower, Ephraim McDowell, Huey Long, Hannibal Hamlin, Samuel Adams, Gerald Ford, William Jennings Bryan, Po’pay, John Burke (of North Dakota), James Garfield, Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, Washington and Jefferson. I looked in vain for Philo T. Farnsworth, since who wouldn’t want to see him?”

Yet when I saw the lanky statue of boob-tube inventor Philo T. Farnsworth in the Utah State Capitol last month, I was sure I’d seen him at the U.S. Capitol more than 10 years earlier. Memory’s that kind of trickster.

Philo’s among a number of Utahans honored in the capitol, both as statues and in paintings. Curiously, I don’t remember seeing Brigham Young there, who is (unsurprisingly) the other statue in the U.S. Capitol from Utah. Must have missed him.

Utah being a late-blooming state (1896), its capitol is an early 20th-century edifice, designed by Richard K. A. Kletting, a local architect who did a lot of Utah projects.

The capitol has an expansive lawn. When we were there, we watched a man throw frisbees and two dogs catch them in mid-air, again and again.

Speaking of tricky memories, before visiting the capitol this time, I wasn’t sure whether I’d seen it in 1980. I got a good look this time.

Detail inside the dome. Note the seagulls in the sky.

Lots of nice detail in the building. Some allegories.

Some display cases on the first floor depicting Utah history, including one calling the state “America’s Film Set.”

One exhibiting beehive items.

Beehives are worked into the architectural detail, too.

Now I’m sure I didn’t see this place 40-odd years ago, because even after that long I’d remember such a magnificent capitol.

Colonial Williamsburg

Posted on October 29, 2019 by admin

Things to bring to Colonial Williamsburg: money, walking shoes, water (especially in summer) and — I can’t stress this enough — some historical imagination. Not everyone has much. I understand that. Still, if you can’t bring much historical imagination to your visit, best to go somewhere else.

A look at a few of the recent “terrible” reviews of Colonial Williamsburg on TripAdvisor illustrates the point (all sic).

Mrpetsaver: This place is like that fort or museum with old buildings common in some communities, but on a larger scale.

My kids got bored very quickly and so did I. Most of the staff are great and professional dressed up in costumes, but aren’t acting. Instead, they discuss how the original inhabitants did their different jobs etc.

Dewpayne: It has some very interesting sites but there so far away you get bored it’s more about the shops and selling water I wouldn’t recommend it.

zebra051819: This historical site was a huge disappointment and I would not recommend spending your time here. There must be more informative sites where one could gain an appreciation of Civil War history.

Mrpetsaver is right, though. Colonial Williamsburg is a larger version of an open-air museum. It is an open-air museum. One on a grand scale, the likes of which we’d only experienced — sort of — at Greenfield Village.

Colonial Williamsburg shouldn’t be confused with Williamsburg, Virginia, which is a town of around 14,500 on the lower reaches of the James River. As a 21st-century American town, it has the usual amenities, such as honky-tonks (maybe), Dairy Queens and 7-11s, where you can buy cherry pies, candy bars and chocolate-chip cookies.

Colonial Williamsburg, on the other hand, occupies 173 acres and includes 88 original buildings and more than 50 major reconstructions. All of Colonial Williamsburg is within modern Williamsburg, but not all of modern Williamsburg involves Colonial Williamsburg. A fair bit of it doesn’t, according to maps.

A hundred years ago, Williamsburg was a small college town with a history, namely as the second capital of Virginia when it was a prosperous tobacco colony. No doubt the story of how Colonial Williamsburg came to be in the early 20th century is fairly complicated, with a number of major players, but I’m going to oversimplify by saying that Money wanted it to happen, as persuaded by Preservationism.

Money in the form of Rockefeller scion John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had the deep pockets necessary to start the purchase and restoration of the historic sites, and Preservationism in the form of W.A.R. Goodwin (1869–1939), rector of Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, who felt alarmed that the 20th century was eating away at the area’s historic structures.

Colonial Williamsburg is a odd hybrid of past and present, but also of museum and neighborhood. The foundation that runs the museum doesn’t play it up — and some of the disappointed TripAdvisor reviews note it ruefully — but it turns out that you don’t need a ticket to wander along the streets of Colonial Williamsburg.

Cars aren’t allowed on the streets during museum hours, but visitors are perfectly free to park a few blocks away and walk around. That’s because the town of Williamsburg still owns the streets and sidewalks, making them public thoroughfares.

Also — another thing the foundation doesn’t dwell on — people live in Colonial Williamsburg. “There are dozens of people — families, couples, college students — who live in some of the historic homes of Colonial Williamsburg,” says Local Scoop. “Many of the homes are original colonial-era buildings; others were rebuilt based on historical accounts to look like the homes they once were.

“It’s not a perk available to everyone. To live in the Historic Area, one has to work at Colonial Williamsburg or be an employee at the College of William & Mary. In all, there are 75 houses rented through the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation…”

I found this out when I was there, and pretty soon I started noticing that a fair number of the houses had small signs denoting them as private residences. I also noticed a few people doing neighborhood sorts of things, like jogging or walking their dogs, as opposed to tourist sorts of things.

So why buy a ticket? That’s so you can see the interiors of the many buildings flying the Grand Union flag. They mark the open-air museum’s buildings.
Also, your ticket gets you into some Colonial Williamsburg events, many of which involve reenactors. So we got tickets. At $45 each, and no student discount (grumble), that’s more than Henry Ford/Greenfield, in the same league as some theater tickets and some theme parks, and less than other theme parks (whose mascot is a Mouse).

At that price, I was determined to wear out my feet. So we did, spending October 14 from late morning to late afternoon at Colonial Williamsburg. At the end, I felt like I’d gotten my money’s worth. I’m a sucker for open-air museums, for one thing, but more than that, it is a special place with a lot to see and think about, if you add a dash of historical imagination.

You walk from the visitor center along a wooded path until you come to the historic buildings. The first one of any heft is the Governor’s Palace.
Maybe no grand thing back in England, but for colonial Virginia, a worthy residence for the gov. What you see now is a reconstruction from plans and, according to the guide on the interior tour that we joined, archaeological investigation of the materials left when the building collapsed in a fire in 1781, not long after Gov. Jefferson had decamped to Richmond.

When it burned, the structure was being used as a hospital for men wounded at the Battle of Yorktown. All of them but one escaped the fire, the guide said. I told Ann we should listen for that unfortunate fellow’s ghost. She told me to shush.

From there we wandered down the Palace Green to Duke of Gloucester St., pretty much the main street of the historic area. The view from the other end of the Palace Green.
Nearby is the Bruton Parish Church. It isn’t one of the Colonial Williamsburg buildings, but people go in as if it were. We did. A couple of parishioners were on hand to tell visitors about the church.
The building dates from the 1710s, but according to this history, it didn’t look much like the original by the mid-1800s, after various alterations and modernizations. Like Colonial Williamsburg, the church was restored to its 18th-century appearance only in the early 20th century.

The church’s graveyard was fenced in, but you could get a pretty good look at it anyway.
Some of the stones were close to the church itself.
The stone of Letitia Tyler Semple, one of President Tyler’s many children. A handful of stones were inside, flush with the floor of the church, as you see in old English churches. W.A.R. Goodwin has one of those.

We spent the rest of the day looking at and entering various structures on or near Duke of Glouchester St., such as the Geddy Foundry, the Courthouse, the Market Square, the Magazine, the Printing Office, the Silversmith, Bakery, Apothecary, and Raleigh Tavern, where we saw two reenactors: one playing Marquis de Lafayette and other James Armistead Lafayette, who spied for the Patriots at the Marquis’ request, and, after some inexcusable delays by the state of Virginia, finally won his freedom for his service.

Duke of Glouchester St.
The Magazine and its arms.
The Courthouse and nearby stocks. No rotten tomatoes on hand for tossing.
Duke of Glouchester St. Courthouse

Botetourt St.
The reconstructed Capitol was the second-to-last place we visited, taking a late-afternoon tour. Nicely done, I thought, though the authenticity of the redesign has been questioned.
The last place was Charlton’s Coffeehouse, where a foundation employee (“costumed interpreter”) in 18th-century garb showed us around and served visitors either coffee, tea or hot chocolate. Most of us tried the chocolate, as Ann and I did. Colonial hot chocolate included a variety of flavors not usually associated with modern hot chocolate. If I remember right, almonds, cinnamon and nutmeg in our case, but no rum. Our time is decidedly more abstemious than Colonial days when it comes to alcohol. Tasty anyway.

Some people expect the costumed interpreters to be actors (see above). To varying degrees they were in character, but mostly their job was to explain what went on in a particular building, and in the places like the foundry and silversmith and printing office, demonstrate some of the 18th-century work techniques. I had no complaints.

The fellow in the foundry turned out pewterware before our eyes and the young woman who showed us around the coffeeshop was informative and entertaining, telling us for instance the story of the tax collector (under the Stamp Act, I believe) who was greeted at the coffeehouse by a committee (mob) of citizens who suggested he find other work for himself. Wisely, he did.

There are restaurants at Colonial Williamsburg in some of the “taverns,” but I didn’t want to spend time at a sit-down restaurant when there were other things to see. So we subsisted on snacks during the visit, which are available in Colonial-themed small stores here and there on the grounds.

The 21st-century snacks were good.

The Virginia State Capitol

Posted on October 21, 2019 by admin

The Commonwealth of Virginia certainly doesn’t care what I think, but I’m going to offer it my opinion anyway, about what it calls part of its legislature. The modern name for the lower chamber of the Virginia legislature is the House of Delegates — modern, as in after 1776. Nice, but a little blah.

Before that, the chamber was the House of Burgesses. That’s a spiffier name. Virginia’s lower house ought to go back to using it. The House of Burgesses had a long and honorable history before the change. “Burgesses” must have been trashed in a fit of revolutionary ardor for new names, but that was more than two centuries ago. Even better, no other state uses it. By contrast, Maryland and West Virginia both use “House of Delegates.”

State legislature names are mostly uninspired anyway, except maybe for the formal title of the Massachusetts legislature, which is the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Nearby, there’s also the the General Court of New Hampshire, which (incidentally) Ballotpedia tells us is the fourth-largest English-speaking legislative body in the world (at 424 members), behind only the Parliament of the UK, the US Congress, and the Parliament of India.

On the morning of October 12, Ann and I made our way to Capitol Square in Richmond. The Thomas Jefferson-designed state capitol is its handsome centerpiece.

The capitol has a distinctive look among those of the several states, taking its inspiration from a Roman temple in France, the Maison Carrée.

Just outside the capitol building is an embedded Virginia seal, with Tyranny lying slain beneath the foot of Virtus.
I told Ann what the Latin meant, and she seemed amused that a state would put something so badass on its formal seal. Compared to the anodyne figures on most state seals, she has a point.

It looks like you walk up the hillside steps to enter the capitol, but in fact you walk down them. Since a redevelopment in the early years of this century, visitors enter the Virginia State Capitol via an underground passage that runs underneath the hillside steps.
We took a guided tour starting there. One of the first things you see in the underground annex — and it’s a large space, at 27,000 square feet — is the architect himself in bronze.
“The statue represents Jefferson around the age of 42 — about the time he was designing the building — and he is holding an architectural drawing of the Capitol,” says the Richmond Times-Dispatch…

“Ivan Schwartz, co-founder of StudioEIS, created the statue… The statue weighs 800 pounds and stands nearly 8 feet tall, representing a larger-than-life Jefferson. Its pedestal is made of EW Gold, a dolomitic limestone quarried in Missouri.”

The passage leads to the capitol proper. Though there’s no exterior dome, there is an interior one. Underneath it is another figure of the Revolution in stone. The figure of the Revolution.
Tracy L. Kamerer and Scott W. Nolley, writing for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, praise it highly: “In Richmond stands a marble statue of George Washington that is among the most notable pieces of eighteenth-century art, one of the most important works in the nation, and, some think, the truest likeness of perhaps the first American to become himself an icon.

“A life-sized representation sculpted by France’s Jean-Antoine Houdon between 1785 and 1791 on a commission from Virginia’s legislature, it was raised in the capitol rotunda in 1796…

“Houdon’s careful recording of Washington’s image and personality yielded a sensitive and lifelike portrait. When the Marquis de Lafayette, Washington’s friend and compatriot, saw the statue for the first time, he said: ‘That is the man himself. I can almost realize he is going to move.’ ”

The Houdon Washington spawned many copies in the 19th and 20th centuries, some of which are in other state capitols and cities, and one that I’ve seen that stands in Chicago City Hall. Others are as far away as the UK and Peru.

Jefferson and Washington are only the beginning of the statuary in the Virginia State Capitol. In alcoves surrounding the Houdon Washington are busts of the other U.S. presidents born in Virginia — Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, William Henry Harrison, Tyler, Taylor, and Wilson — along with Lafayette, who’s there until there’s another president from Virginia, the guide said.

The Old House Chamber, whose entrance is behind Washington’s back, has been restored to look the part of a 19th-century legislative chamber, but also to be a repository of sculpture. It’s replete with marble and bronze busts and statues, representing various Virginians, including George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, Patrick Henry, George Wythe and Meriwether Lewis. Non-Virginians have their place, too: namely Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens.

CSA generals include Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, Joseph E. Johnston, Fitzhugh Lee, and of course Robert E. Lee looking pretty much like Robert E. Lee.

It wouldn’t be the last representation of Lee we’d see in Richmond. This particular bronze was created by Rudulph Evans in 1931 and erected where Lee stood on April 23, 1861, when he accepted command of the military forces of Virginia.

That wasn’t the only event associated with the Old House. In December 1791, the House voted to ratify the proposed U.S. Bill of Rights in the room. In 1807, Aaron Burr was acquitted of treason in the room in a Federal Circuit Court trial presided over by John Marshall. Various Virginia constitutional conventions met in the room, and so did the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861. The entire Virginia State Capitol soon became the Confederate Capitol as well.

We also visited the modern Senate chamber — the modern House of Delegates was closed — and it looks the part of a well-appointed working legislative chamber, without a surfeit of statues.

The Old Senate chamber sports paintings depicting the first arrival of Englishmen in Virginia, John Smith, Pocahontas, and a scene at the Battle of Yorktown. In the Jefferson Room is a scale model of the capitol that Jefferson had commissioned in France to guide the builders in Virginia, since he wouldn’t be there to supervise things personally.

We spent time on the capitol grounds as well. The most imposing among a number of memorials near the capitol is the George Washington equestrian — formally the Virginia Washington Memorial, by Thomas Crawford — which is surrounded by other colonial Virginians of note and allegories.

The CSA was represented on the grounds as well, as you’d expect, including a Stonewall Jackson bronze. Other memorials are closer to our own time. This is part of the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial, created by Stanley Bleifeld and dedicated in 2008.

A memorial dedicated to Virginia women, a collection of bronzes, was still under wraps when we looked it — but slated for dedication only two days later, on October 14.

There was even more to see, but eventually hunger took us away from Capitol Square to a nearby hipster waffle house — the Capitol Waffle Shop — for lunch. I had my waffles with egg and sausage on top, a combination that worked very well. Also good: hipster food prices in a town like Richmond are less than in places like Brooklyn, just like prices for everything else.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: capitols