Colleen Hayes, Wisconsin Historical Society
Clockwise from top: The first Capitol in Madison, built from 1837 through 1846. Madison’s second Capitol burned from 3:20 a.m. until late in the afternoon on Feb. 27, 1904. Our marvel, our skyline magnet and Madison’s reason for being—our third Capitol.
It’s our marvel, our skyline magnet and Madison’s reason for being: Happy birthday to Wisconsin’s Capitol! The building celebrates 100 years next week.
The dome will be lit red, white and blue the evening of July 5 to coincide with Concerts on the Square, which will also salute the anniversary.
Born of fire, the Capitol has seen heroes, rascals, riotous protests and countless schoolchildren on field trips from around the state. Early guidebooks to Madison and the Capitol, newspaper clippings and files at the Wisconsin Historical Society paint a dramatic story.
It is Wisconsin’s self-portrait of 1917, painted in granite and marble.
Depending on how you count it, the Capitol is our third or fifth. Congress created the Wisconsin Territory in 1836. It included all of what became Minnesota and parts of the Dakotas. With future boundaries uncertain, the site of government moved around.
The first Capitol building, in today’s Belmont, Wis., has been restored as an historic site. The second, in Burlington, Iowa, lasted only a few months.
The third territorial capitol was built in Madison. It became our first state Capitol when Wisconsin entered the union in 1848.
That Capitol had a tin dome 26 feet in diameter. It was most famous for the murder of Charles Coatsworth Pinckney Arndt by fellow representative James R. Vineyard on the floor of the Legislature, Feb. 11, 1842. Charged only with manslaughter, it’s a sign of how wild a frontier we were that, after a brief trial, Vineyard was found “not guilty.”
Work on a much larger building began in 1869. It was from this second state Capitol that Gov. Robert M. La Follette launched the Progressive Era; he never served a day in the current one. Most of the Capitol was lost Feb. 27, 1904, in a devastating fire. Among other scandals, the building was uninsured.
Even before that, the Legislature had been looking for additional space. The Wisconsin Capitol Commission was formed, and it hired Daniel Burnham as its consultant.
Burnham was a Chicago-based architect with grand vision. “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized,” he proclaimed.
The man behind New York’s Flatiron Building, Burnham eventually created city master plans for Chicago and Washington, D.C. At the time, however, he was most famous for a project that launched a movement and redesigned the nation: the World Columbian Exposition of 1893.
Better known as the Chicago World’s Fair, the expo had a profound effect on American culture, introducing such products as Cream of Wheat, Cracker Jacks and the Hershey Bar. Frederick Pabst won his blue ribbon at the fair. George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., premiered a 264-foot wheel that was named for himself.
The Columbian Exposition also inspired the City Beautiful Movement, which had a direct influence on our Capitol and its surrounding “Capitol Park.” The fair was a planned neoclassical community spread over 600 acres. The style was — and is — widely copied. Burnham and the Wisconsin Capitol Commission didn’t look far for the designer of a new building. Plans were solicited from five leading architectural firms, and the winner was George B. Post and Sons, of New York. The firm’s design was chosen “as having the most merit from a practical and artistic point of view.”
Post had worked closely with Burnham as one of the featured architects at the World’s Fair. His firm designed its Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, then the largest structure in the entire world — 44 acres, enclosed. It was the most acclaimed building at the exposition.
Post created a Renaissance Revival Wisconsin Capitol that would have been right at home at the World’s Fair. For art and architectural ornamentation, he and Burnham called on a long list of exposition colleagues. Daniel Chester French sculpted “Wisconsin,” the figure on top of the dome. It’s essentially a scaled-down version of French’s 60-foot statue of “The Republic,” which stood watch over the fair.
The second Capitol was torn down as the third went up. Construction began in 1907. It was completed in sections. Though there is no official opening date for the building, July 1, 1917 may be viewed as its birthday. That was when records identify its status changing from “construction” to “maintenance.”
The building’s footprint and shape were fixed by the Legislature in 1905. There are 2,500 tons of steel in the 76-foot diameter dome. Each wing is 125 feet wide and 187 feet long. From the end of one wing to the other is 434 feet. When the building opened it had 1,500 doors, three keys for each, and a full-time locksmith.
“I have more trouble with the state senators than anyone else when it comes to lost keys,” locksmith William Henwood told The Milwaukee Journal in 1923.
Though most of us enter at street level, “the formal approaches and entrances” are on the ends of the four avenues, according to a state history of the project. Those are the second-level entries atop broad staircases. The stairs lead to interior “pavilions,” each capped with a small dome. Continuing inside, visitors experience an expansive view of the rotunda, granting a sense of arrival.
White granite from the exterior was sourced from Vemont and marble was used extensively on the interior.
The Capitol included engineering novelties of the time, such as “wires for telephones and telegraph.” Outlets for air intake were hidden in pedestals for exterior statuary placed around the dome. The basement contained a refrigerating plant, which provided ice water from a deep well on the property to drinking fountains. The building had 168 clocks, all running in unison with a master clock.
The Capitol Commission had initially planned on expenditures of only 40 cents per square foot. That initial budget was insufficient, and would have “necessitated the use of brick or limestone for the outside finish of the walls.”
Separate appropriations were passed. In the end, $476,000 was spent just on art. Another $496,000 went toward part of the Capitol that’s invisible to most visitors — the Capitol Heat and Power Plant was planned and budgeted as part of the building. A system of tunnels connects it to the Capitol 2,600 feet to the west. Its designer was Lew F. Porter, secretary of the Capitol Commission.
The final total cost was more than $7.2 million. From 1988 to 2002, more than $158 million was spent on an exhaustive renovation and restoration. Besides rediscovering extensive stenciling, original furniture was collected and designed by Post’s firm.
By contrast, the first Capitol in Madison cost $60,000. There are two known photos of it.
A little more of the second Capitol survives: Genius of Wisconsin, a sculpture that stood in its rotunda, and a replica of Forward, at the head of State Street. One of its architects may also survive, in a fashion; the ghost of August Kutzbock is said to haunt Picnic Point, where he purposefully walked into Lake Mendota to drown.
George Post died four years before today’s Capitol opened. Daniel Burnham died a year later. But he left us a living legacy.
“Make big plans,” Burnham once said. “Aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but, long after we are gone, be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence.”
