Vandalia State House: Where Lincoln Started and Illinois Lost Its Capital

In the town of Vandalia, on a quiet square in the heart of downstate Illinois, stands a small white Federal-style building that is the oldest surviving capitol in the state. It looks modest, two stories, tall windows, austere brick beneath white paint, and that modesty is part of the story. Vandalia's leaders knew their time as capital was running out, and they built this statehouse in eighteen thirty-six in a deliberate attempt to keep it.

Vandalia had been Illinois's capital since eighteen twenty, moved there from the original capital at Kaskaskia on the Mississippi. It sat on the northern edge of the settled Illinois frontier, and for two decades it functioned as the seat of a rapidly growing state. Three capitol buildings rose and fell here before the fourth, the one that stands today, was completed.

By the mid-eighteen thirties, Illinois's population had shifted decisively northward. The Sangamon County delegation to the state legislature, a group of nine tall men who became known as the Long Nine, argued that a central location had become an eccentric one. Their leader was a young lawyer and freshman state representative from New Salem named Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln served four terms in the Illinois House of Representatives, from eighteen thirty-four to eighteen forty-two, the earlier ones while the capital was still at Vandalia. He made his first recorded public statement against slavery from the Vandalia statehouse floor in eighteen thirty-seven. He worked the legislature for a massive internal improvements package, roads, canals, railroads, and in the same session maneuvered successfully to move the capital to Springfield.

The last session at Vandalia closed on March fourth, eighteen thirty-nine. The white building on the square has been a state historic site ever since, the place where a future president learned to be a politician, and where a town discovered that losing the capital could also mean becoming history.