The Capitol That Burned and Came Back

The Wisconsin State Capitol you see today is the third building to stand on this square. The first was a small territorial structure put up in the eighteen thirties. The second was more substantial but architecturally modest. On the night of February twenty-sixth, nineteen-oh-four, the second Capitol caught fire.

The cause was a gas jet, lit in a second-floor closet near the Assembly post office. The building had a modern firefighting system, but the University of Wisconsin reservoir that supplied the Capitol's water was empty that night. By the time the city's alternative water supply was switched in, the fire had control.

The damage was severe enough to necessitate an entirely new building. Plans were solicited from five leading firms. The winner was the New York firm of George B. Post and Sons, whose design was selected, in the evaluation committee's words, as having the most merit from a practical and artistic point of view.

Post designed the building in the Beaux-Arts style: four equal wings arranged in a Greek cross, four semicircular pavilions at the angles, and a central dome that rises two hundred eighty-four feet from the ground to the tip of a gilded bronze statue titled Wisconsin, sculpted by Daniel Chester French. The building is faced with Bethel White granite. Construction ran from nineteen-oh-six to nineteen seventeen, at a cost of seven point two million dollars.

The dome is the largest granite dome in the world and the largest state capitol dome by volume in the United States, slightly shorter but broader than the dome in Washington. Height limits around the square, upheld by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in nineteen twenty-one, ensure that nothing built in downtown Madison can exceed the Capitol's roofline. The dome has dominated the skyline for over a century and, by legal protection, it always will.