Vermont State House
Near Stowe, Vermont
The gold dome catching the light above Montpelier belongs to the third building Vermont has tried to get right. The first statehouse was a wooden structure, completed in eighteen oh eight. The second was a genuine architectural statement: architect Ammi B. Young designed a Greek Revival temple with granite columns six feet in diameter, each block hauled by ox-team from the quarries near Barre. Young modeled the portico on the Temple of Theseus in Athens and capped the whole thing with a saucer dome inspired by the Pantheon in Rome. It was completed in eighteen thirty-eight and looked permanent.
It was not. On January sixth, eighteen fifty-seven, a fire that started in the heating system gutted the building. Young was in Washington by then, busy designing federal courthouses, so the reconstruction fell to Thomas Silloway. He salvaged what he could, keeping the original granite portico and the surviving walls, then rebuilt everything behind them in the emerging Italianate style. The result was completed in eighteen fifty-nine and is essentially what you see today.
At the very top sits a wooden statue of the Roman goddess Ceres, holding a sheaf of wheat, representing the agricultural heart of Vermont. The first Ceres was carved in eighteen fifty-eight by Brattleboro sculptor Larkin Goldsmith Mead. By the nineteen thirties she had rotted through with fungus. Rather than pay for a professional replacement, the Sergeant at Arms, a man named Dwight Dwinell, recruited two janitors and the three of them carved a new one themselves. That spirit of stubborn Yankee economy is somehow entirely appropriate for the smallest state capital in the United States by population.
The dome itself was painted red for most of the building's first half-century. Gold leaf did not arrive until nineteen oh six. It has been regilded ten times since, requiring roughly seventy thousand sheets of gold leaf each time. On a clear afternoon the dome is visible from the hills above town, a small bright point against the Green Mountains, marking one of the most intimate working legislatures in America.
