The Art Deco Capitol and the Gold Man on Top
Near Salem, Oregon
The building ahead of you is one of the most distinctive state capitols in the country, and almost no one outside Oregon knows it. The Oregon State Capitol is Art Deco, built from nineteen thirty-six to nineteen thirty-eight with partial funding from the federal Public Works Administration during the Great Depression. It cost about two and a half million dollars, which in nineteen thirty-eight money was a substantial sum, and it was dedicated on October first of that year with remarks from President Franklin Roosevelt.
The design came from a nationwide competition that drew one hundred twenty-three entries. The winner was a New York firm called Trowbridge and Livingston, working with architect Francis Keally. What they produced is a building of reinforced concrete sheathed entirely in white Vermont marble, brisk and geometric, with a cylindrical drum rising to a lantern dome one hundred sixty-six feet above the ground. Oregon is one of only three state capitols in the country built in the Art Deco style.
At the very top stands a gilded figure twenty-two feet tall known as the Oregon Pioneer. Sculptor Ulric Ellerhusen designed him holding a splitting axe in his right hand with the blade toward the ground, and a tarp in his left, as though he is about to build a shelter. The statue was hoisted into place in September nineteen thirty-eight, and the gold leaf has been refreshed four times since then, most recently in the year two thousand.
Two previous capitol buildings burned, one in eighteen fifty-five and another in nineteen thirty-five. The current building is Oregon's third, and it was designed to last. Inside the rotunda, four murals by artists Barry Faulkner and Frank Schwarz depict scenes from Oregon history. Above them all, the golden pioneer stands watch over the Willamette Valley, axe in hand, tarp ready.
