U.S. Capitol

The Capitol in the archive is a building under construction more often than not. Between 1850 and 1892 it was almost continuously a work site, and the photographers who came for hearings and inaugurations kept catching the scaffolding.

The reason is a problem of proportion. Thomas U. Walter’s extension of the 1850s added the two marble wings that hold the current House and Senate chambers, and it roughly doubled the building’s length. That left the original low copper dome looking absurdly small on top of it — a hat two sizes too little. So the dome had to be replaced, and what went up instead is cast iron painted to look like stone. Nearly nine million pounds of it.

Work continued straight through the Civil War, and that was a decision rather than an oversight. Lincoln let it go forward as a public statement that the government expected to still exist when it was finished. Photographs from 1861 to 1863 show the ribs of the unfinished dome open to the sky above a city full of soldiers. The Statue of Freedom was set on top in December 1863, in sections, with an artillery salute.

Inside, two rooms in these photographs are ghosts. The old Senate chamber became the Supreme Court and stayed that way until 1935, so for most of the period covered here the Court had no building of its own and sat inside the Capitol. The old House chamber became Statuary Hall, a room with famously strange acoustics that carry a whisper across the floor.

The grounds were rebuilt too. Frederick Law Olmsted worked on them from 1874 to 1892, and the marble terraces on the west front are his — built to give the building a proper base and to keep the hill from looking as though the Capitol had been set down on it by accident. The small stone summerhouse with the grotto and spring is also Olmsted, and it turns up in photographs more often than its size deserves.

Inaugurations are the other great subject. They were held on the east front from 1829 until 1981, which is where the familiar photographs of enormous crowds facing the building come from. The east front is the side with the columns and the steps; the west front, which is what television shows now, was a service side for most of this period.

Ten thousand people worked on the building at various points, including enslaved laborers who quarried and hauled the stone for the original construction. The Capitol did not acknowledge that in writing until 2012.

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