The Dome That Made a Career

The building in front of you took six years to construct, covers nine acres of hand-painted surfaces inside, and launched the career of one of the most prolific capitol architects in American history. The Michigan State Capitol, completed in eighteen seventy-nine, was Elijah E. Myers' first major commission, and it was the one that proved everything.

Myers was born in Philadelphia in eighteen thirty-two and had been doing commercial work in Springfield, Illinois when Michigan put its new capitol out for competition in eighteen seventy-one. He submitted a design under the motto Tuebor, a Latin word meaning I will defend, which also happens to be on the Michigan state seal. The selection committee chose his plan. Construction began with the cornerstone ceremony on October second, eighteen seventy-three, when an estimated fifty thousand visitors descended on a city that at the time held far fewer residents. The building finished seven years later, though the legislature moved in while work was still underway.

What emerged was a cast-iron dome modeled loosely on the United States Capitol but with Myers' own layering of classical detail. The dome rises two hundred sixty-seven feet from the ground to the tip of its spire. The rotunda below it is forty-four and a half feet across and climbs one hundred sixty feet to the oculus.

A restoration completed in nineteen ninety-two stabilized roughly forty-five elaborately decorated ceilings and returned the dome to its original creamy-white. That same year the National Park Service designated the building a National Historic Landmark, a designation reserved for America's most significant historic places.

Myers went on to design the Texas State Capitol in Austin and the Colorado State Capitol in Denver. No other architect has designed as many American state capitol buildings. Michigan came first, and in some ways remains the most intimate.