The Gold-Leaf Capitol

Construction began on the Wyoming State Capitol in eighteen eighty-six, four years before Wyoming was even admitted to the Union. They were building the statehouse while still a territory, an act of institutional confidence, or perhaps impatience, that the building itself reflects.

The dome sits one hundred forty-six feet above ground, sheathed in copper and covered in twenty-four-karat gold leaf. Only ten state capitols in the country have gold-leaf domes. Wyoming's is among the most visible from the city's flat approach, catching afternoon light in a way that rewards a long look.

Inside, the architects David Williams Gibbs and William DuBois installed a checkerboard marble floor in the first-floor rotunda, a cherry wood staircase shipped from Ohio, and English stained glass in blue, purple, and green. Eight murals by Allen Tupper True, added in nineteen seventeen, depict Wyoming's landscape, its cattle industry, and the people who lived on these plains before statehood.

The dome was re-gilded in two thousand nine, a project costing one point three million dollars. A major restoration between twenty sixteen and twenty nineteen upgraded the structure's bones, including stairs, elevators, electrical systems, and heating, while preserving the Victorian interiors. The building reopened on July tenth, twenty nineteen, the hundred and twenty-ninth anniversary of Wyoming statehood.

The Capitol was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen eighty-seven. It remains the seat of Wyoming's legislature and the office of its governor, working history rather than preserved memory.