Arizona State Capitol: Territory to Statehood Under One Dome

The copper-domed building in front of you is the only state capitol in the United States that served both a territory and a state under the same roof, a distinction that makes it a document of American expansion as much as a government building.

Construction began in March eighteen ninety-nine under the design of architect James Riely Gordon. The territorial government moved in on May first, nineteen hundred, with construction wrapping up the following year. Gordon specified copper sheathing for the dome to honor the territory's defining industry, but the contractors installed a cheaper material, Terne metal, a lead-and-tin alloy painted to look like copper. That substitution went unnoticed for eighty years.

Atop the dome Gordon placed a sixteen-foot, six-hundred-pound zinc weathervane in the form of the Greek goddess Nike, which Arizonans named the Winged Victory. She was designed to rotate freely in the wind, but her position was eventually fixed in place so she would not present her back to the main entrance. Cowboys in the territorial era reportedly used her for target practice.

When Arizona became the forty-eighth state on February fourteenth, nineteen twelve, the same building that had housed the territorial government became the statehouse. No other capital in the country made that direct transition.

In nineteen fifty-seven the Winged Victory was fixed permanently in place. By nineteen seventy-four the building had stopped serving as the working capitol, and in nineteen eighty-one it reopened to the public as a museum. During a nineteen eighty-one restoration, workers discovered the dome fraud: the dome was stripped and resheathed with fifteen tons of actual copper donated by Arizona mining companies.

The building now operates as the Arizona Capitol Museum. The legislature works in newer wings on either side, but the original territorial-era structure stands essentially unchanged, a record of the moment when the Southwest became American.