The Gothic Castle on the River

When Louisiana needed a new state capitol in the eighteen forties, the architect James H. Dakin designed something nobody expected: a Gothic Revival castle perched on the bluff above the Mississippi River. It had crenellated towers, pointed arches, and the general silhouette of a medieval fortress. It was completely unlike every other statehouse in the country. That was entirely intentional.

The building went up between eighteen forty-seven and eighteen fifty-two, and it immediately provoked strong opinions. Mark Twain, who worked these waters as a steamboat pilot in the eighteen fifties, was not impressed. In his memoir 'Life on the Mississippi,' he wrote that it was pathetic that a whitewashed castle with turrets and things should have been built in this otherwise honorable place, and blaming Sir Walter Scott's romantic novels for the South's fondness for medievalism.

The building had a rough life. During the Civil War, Union troops occupied it as a garrison and prison, and it caught fire twice while they were in residence. After the war, the gutted shell was rebuilt by architect William A. Freret, who installed a spiral staircase and a remarkable stained-glass dome that turns the interior into something genuinely beautiful.

In eighteen eighty-two, the restored building reopened. It served as Louisiana's capitol until nineteen thirty-two, when Huey Long's skyscraper tower replaced it.

Today it is the Museum of Political History, which is perhaps exactly the right use for a building that has housed so much Louisiana politics over so many years. The stained-glass dome is still there. So is the view of the river. Twain was wrong about the building. He was right that the river is the point.