The Old Capitol and the State It Built

The small red-and-white striped dome you see in front of the modern skyscraper tower is not ornamental. It is the actual seat of Florida government from eighteen forty-five, and it almost disappeared completely.

When Florida was admitted to the Union on March third, eighteen forty-five, lawmakers needed a permanent home. Congress had appropriated twenty thousand dollars six years earlier, and the resulting brick capitol anchored the city's hilltop. It was modest by any standard, a utilitarian building serving a young frontier state. Over the next six decades it expanded incrementally as Florida grew from under one hundred thousand people to over half a million. Architect Frank Millburn added the distinctive dome in nineteen oh two, giving the building the classical silhouette it carries today.

For over a century the Old Capitol was the center of Florida's political universe. Governors were inaugurated here. Secession from the Union was debated here in eighteen sixty-one. Reconstruction governments convened here. Every Jim Crow law, every civil rights skirmish that passed through the legislature played out under this dome.

By the nineteen seventies, the building had been expanded and altered into near-incoherence. When the state approved a new modern tower directly behind it, there were serious proposals to demolish the old structure entirely. Preservationists prevailed, barely. In nineteen eighty-two, restorers stripped away decades of additions and returned the building to its nineteen oh two appearance, including the art-glass dome interior and the red-and-white canvas awnings that read as anachronistic to modern eyes but are historically accurate.

Today it operates as a museum. The new tower rising behind it was designed by Edward Durel Stone and completed in nineteen seventy-seven. If you squint at the old and new buildings together, you are looking at a hundred and fifty years of Florida compressed into a single view.