The Tower of the Plains

Stand anywhere in Lincoln and look south: that tower does not look like any other capitol building in America.

Most state capitols wear their Greek Revival columns and their shallow domes like a uniform. When Nebraska's legislative commission began looking for a new capitol architect in nineteen twenty, the old building was already failing and the state wanted something different. The commission organized a national competition, submitted designs were identified only by number, and the jury reviewed them blind. Design Number Four was chosen.

The architect was Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, a New Yorker known for ecclesiastical Gothic work across the country. His rationale for the design was spare and direct: Nebraska, he said, is a level country, and its capitol should have some altitude or beacon effect. What he proposed was a four-hundred-foot tower rising from a low base of offices and chambers, the whole thing faced in limestone, the tower capped with a gold-tiled dome and then, above the dome, something more unusual still.

Construction began in nineteen twenty-two. Goodhue died in April of nineteen twenty-four, two years in, and his associates completed the project. The building was finished in nineteen thirty-two after a decade of work spread across four building phases. The budget was constrained enough that phases were spread out over time to avoid debt. Nebraska, alone among states, paid for its new capitol as it built it, incurring no bonded debt for the construction.

The figure that crowns the tower is called The Sower. Sculptor Lee Lawrie cast him in bronze, nineteen feet tall and weighing seven tons. The statue and its pedestal were fabricated in New York and shipped to Lincoln on an open flatcar. On an afternoon in nineteen thirty-two, a derrick perched atop the completed tower lifted The Sower by cable, and thousands of Lincolnites watched the seven-ton figure rise three hundred sixty-two feet in the air. It took three days to rig the lift and about fifteen minutes to make it.

The tower can be seen from twenty miles away across the flat prairie. The building houses something else singular: the Nebraska Legislature is the only unicameral state legislature in the United States. It has been since nineteen thirty-seven.