South Dakota's Capitol: The Prairie's Copper Crown
Near Pierre, South Dakota
Pierre, South Dakota sits almost exactly in the center of the state, on a bend of the Missouri River, and the capitol building that watches over it looks larger than a city this size has any right to expect. The dome is clad in copper, oxidized now to a pale blue-green, rising ninety-six feet above the first floor. From the bluffs across the river you can see it for miles before anything else in Pierre comes into view.
The building was completed in nineteen ten, at a cost of just over nine hundred eighty thousand dollars. The architect was Charles E. Bell of Minneapolis, who drew on Beaux-Arts classical forms: a symmetrical limestone facade, a prominent central dome, and four wings extending from the central rotunda. The interior is built around natural light. The rotunda ceiling is sixty-two feet above the floor and ringed with windows, and the legislative chambers are finished in mosaic tile and marble brought from Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Italy. The stained glass dome inside the rotunda was restored in the early two thousands, its ornamental patterns repaired by craftspeople working from the original patterns.
South Dakota became a state on November second, eighteen eighty-nine, one of two states admitted that day alongside North Dakota. President Benjamin Harrison signed both proclamations without looking at which order he was signing them so that neither state could claim to have been admitted first. The legislature met in temporary quarters for twenty years while the question of where to put the permanent capital was fought out in a series of contentious elections. Pierre won in nineteen oh four against a challenge from Mitchell, and construction began almost immediately.
The grounds include a park and a cultural heritage center. The building is still in daily legislative use when the legislature is in session, typically for the first few months of the year. It is among the best-preserved of the original Great Plains state capitols, and the copper dome, now more than a century old, will continue to turn color for decades to come.
