Alabama State Capitol
The Alabama State Capitol, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the First Confederate Capitol, is the state capitol building for Alabama. Located on Capitol Hill, originally Goat Hill, in Montgomery, it was declared a National Historic Landmark on December 19, 1960. Unlike most other state capitols, the Alabama Legislature does not meet there, but at the Alabama State House. The Capitol has the governor's office and otherwise functions as a museum.
Alabama has had five political capitals and four purpose-built capitol buildings during its history since it was designated as a territory of the United States. The first was the territorial capital in St. Stephens in 1817; the state organizing convention was held in Huntsville in 1819, and the first permanent capital was designated in 1820 as Cahaba. The legislature moved the capital to Tuscaloosa in 1826, where it was housed in a new three-story building. The 1826 State House in Tuscaloosa was later used as Alabama Central Female College. After it burned in 1923, the ruins were retained within Capitol Park.
Finally, in 1846, the state legislature moved the capital to Montgomery. The new capitol building in Montgomery, which was located where the current building stands, burned after two years. The current building was completed in 1851, and additional wings were added over the course of the following 140 years. These changes followed population growth in the state from natural growth and immigration as many European-American settlers arrived, who were often slave-holders. Large parts of the state were subsequently developed for cotton cultivation.
The current capitol building temporarily served as the Confederate Capitol while Montgomery served as the first political capital of the Confederate States of America in 1861, before Richmond, Virginia was designated as the capital. Delegates meeting as the Montgomery Convention in the Senate Chamber drew up the Provisional Constitution of the Confederate States on February 4, 1861. The convention also adopted the Permanent Constitution here on March 11, 1861.
Description
Architecturally, the building is Greek Revival in style with some Beaux-Arts influences. The central core of the building and the east wing to the structure's rear, is three stories built over a below-grade basement. The north and south wings are two-stories over a raised basement. The current front facade is approximately wide and tall from ground level to the top of the lantern on the dome.History
First Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery
The first capitol building to be built in Montgomery was designed by Stephen Decatur Button, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Andrew Dexter Jr., one of Montgomery's town founders and influential in the history of Alabama, kept a prime piece of property empty in anticipation of the capital city eventually being moved to Montgomery from Tuscaloosa. This property, atop what was then known as Goat Hill due to its use as a pasture, was chosen as the site for the new state capitol structure. Construction began in 1846, with the new completed building presented to the state on December 6, 1847. Button credited much of his architectural inspiration to Minard Lafever's publication Beauties of Modern Architecture.Button's designed building was stuccoed brick, with two full stories set over a rusticated raised basement. A two-story monumental portico with six Composite columns, topped by a broad pediment, was centered on the middle five bays of the front elevation. A central dome, in diameter, sat directly on a supporting ring at the main roof level behind the portico. The small dome was crowned with an elaborate Cupola lantern on top patterned after the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates. This first capitol building unfortunately burned on December 14, 1849, little more than two years after its completion. The ruins were cleared by March 1850, with a new replacement building soon to follow.
Second (Current) Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery
The current Alabama State Capitol is the sixth State House or Capitol structure in the history of Alabama and the second to be built in the current state capital city of Montgomery. It was built from 1850 to 1851, with Barachias Holt as supervising architect and construction superintendent. Holt, originally from Exeter, Maine, in New England was a master craftsman / mechanic by trade. Following his work on the second Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, he created a successful sash window, door, and window blinds manufacturing factory in Montgomery.The new building used the original remaining brick foundations and general layout of Button's previous structure, with modifications by Holt. The modifications included a taller full three-story building over a basement and a three-story front portico with prominent distinctive “Tower of the Winds Corinthian” columns, which had no pediment in this iteration. Holt's dome was a departure from the previous capitol work also; his wood and cast iron dome was supported on a ring of Corinthian columns and topped with a simple twelve-sided small glazed glass windows in the top lantern. John P. and James D. Randolph were the principal construction contractors. had previously completed extensive brickwork on the William Nichols-designed campus lay-out of buildings for the new University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Randolph was also in charge of the carpentry work, which was likely accomplished by subcontractors. Nimrod E. Benson and Judson Wyman were the building supervisors.
The new Capitol building was first occupied by both chambers of the Alabama Legislature on October 1, 1851. The clock over the portico was installed four months later in February 1852. The clock, along with a bell, was purchased by the City of Montgomery and presented to the state in 1852. In proportion to the capitol building, the clock appears as a square white box with black dials and crowned with a gabled roof. The dials are in diameter with minute hands and a hour hands. It has been criticized as architecturally inappropriate on various occasions since its initial installation.
File:1861 Davis Inaugural.jpg|thumb|left|upright=0.7|Early rare daguerreotype of crowd gathered at the First Inauguration of Jefferson Davis, as provisional President of the Confederate States of America on the steps and under the portico of the second Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, following the organizing sessions of the Provisional Confederate States Congress, on February 18, 1861. Beginnings of the American Civil War, the following April.
With the secession of Alabama and six other Deep South states and subsequent formation of the Confederacy in February 1861, the building served as its first capitol until May 22, 1861. A commemorative brass marker in the shape of a six-pointed star is set into the marble floor of the front portico at the precise location where Jefferson Davis stood on February 18, 1861, to take his oath of office as the only President of the Confederate States of America.
In 1901, delegates met at the Capitol to draft a new revision of the Constitution of Alabama. Convention chair John B. Knox said they were there to end "the menace of negro domination." The new constitution enshrined "White Supremacy by Law" and consolidated and centralized power at the Capitol and away from local county and town governments.
In 1961 Governor John Patterson flew a seven-starred version of the former "Stars and Bars" over the capitol for several days in celebration of the centennial of the American Civil War. His successor, the 45th Governor George C. Wallace, attracted national attention, by raising the rebel Confederate Battle Flag of 1863 over the Capitol dome on April 25, 1963, as a symbol of defiance to the federal government; this was the date of his meeting with visiting United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, to discuss the racial desegregation of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, in the ongoing national civil rights movement and social struggle since the mid-1950s.
The flag continued to be flown over the State Capitol for almost 30 more years. Several African American legislators and members of the state chapter of the NAACP were arrested in 1988 after attempting to remove the flag. In 1991 the flag was removed during renovations to the dome, and its return was barred by a 1993 state court decision. It ruled that an 1895 state statute allows only the national and state flags to be flown over the capitol building.
The building served as home to the Alabama Legislature until 1985, when it moved to the new Alabama State House. Officially, this move was temporary, since the Alabama Constitution requires that the Legislature meet in the capitol. In 1984, a constitutional amendment was passed that allowed the Legislature to move to another building if the capitol were to be renovated. The renovation started in 1985 and was completed in 1992 by the architecture group Holmes and Holmes. When the capitol was reopened, the Governor of Alabama and numerous other state offices moved back into the building, but the legislature remained at the State House.
On May 7, 2009, the legislature reconvened in the capitol building for the first time since September 20, 1985, due to flooding in the State House. This required some adapting, as the capitol did not have desks in the House chamber, and those in the Senate chamber were 1861 replicas. Neither chamber has a computerized voting system. The capitol building's heating and air conditioning is supplied from the State House. Because the electricity had been turned off in the State House due to the flooding, there was no air conditioning in the capitol.
The building
The exterior
The original core of the 1850-1851 building, as well as the subsequent additions of 1885, 1906, 1912, and extensive 1985-1992 renovations project, is essentially Greek Revival architecture in style. The original 1850-18511 three-story core of the building features bays delineated by Doric pilasters and a monumental three-story hexastyle portico utilizing the Composite order. The original core of the building is, with an original central rear judiciary wing measuring. The first extension to the rear added another. Each side-wing is.The additions started with an extension to the east / rear wing on the building's rear facade in 1885. Then a south wing with more elaborate Beaux-Arts architecture styles of influences was added in 1906. A close externally identical north wing on the opposite side was completed six years later in 1912. These two matching side-wings were designed by Montgomery architect Frank Lockwood, in consultation with Charles Follen McKim of the famous architectural firm McKim, Mead & White of New York City. The symmetrical north and south side-wings with newer enlarged legislative chambers for the two houses of the Alabama Senate and the Alabama House of Representatives in the bicameral body of the Alabama State Legislature. Each wing were each joined to the 1851 structure with a narrow hyphen connecting structure. Each hyphen features a recessed two-story Greek Ionic style portico on the west facade. Both of the adjoining side-wings for the Senate and House feature two-story hexastyle Ionic entrance porticoes on their north and south elevations, respectively. The west and east facades of these wings also feature decorative two-story hexastyle pseudo-porticoes with engaged Ionic columns. A new east wing addition with a new three-story tetrastyle portico was built during the 1985–1992 restoration / renovation project.. The new portico includes columns that match the Composite order of the original West Front main entrance portico on the 1851 west side elevation.