Virginia State Capitol

• 1. Introduction

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  The Virginia State Capitol in Richmond holds a distinction most visitors never think to ask about: it houses the oldest elected legislative body in North America. The Virginia General Assembly traces its roots to the House of Burgesses, which first met in 1619. That is more than four centuries of unbroken legislative tradition, predating the United States itself.

  But the Capitol is not merely old. It was designed by Thomas Jefferson, conceived in France, modeled on a Roman temple, and later pressed into service as the seat of a rebel government during the Civil War. A floor inside it once gave way during a court hearing, killing sixty-two people. A missing carpet-bag full of documents is still hidden somewhere in its walls.

  How did a Roman temple end up on a hilltop in Virginia? What happened on the afternoon of the 27th of April 1870? And why did Abraham Lincoln walk its halls just days before his assassination? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Before Richmond

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  Jamestown was where the story began. On the 30th of July 1619, the first Representative Legislative Assembly in the Americas convened at the Jamestown Church. It was a modest, improvised setting for such a consequential event.

  Fire was a recurring adversary in those early years. The colony used four different statehouses at Jamestown, each time forced to rebuild after another conflagration. The pattern repeated itself enough times that relocation began to seem like the sensible answer.

  In 1699, the government decided to move inland to Williamsburg, and by November 1705 a grand new Capitol building stood ready there. Nearby rose the Governor's Palace. That building burned in 1747 and was replaced in 1753, keeping the cycle of fire and reconstruction alive.

  The Williamsburg Capitol witnessed one of the most consequential moments in American history. On the 29th of June 1776, five days before Congress voted for the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, Virginia declared independence from Great Britain and wrote its first state constitution. Governor Thomas Jefferson would later argue that when the Revolutionary War began, the capital needed to move again, this time to Richmond for greater safety. The Williamsburg building held its last session on the 24th of December 1779, when the General Assembly adjourned to reconvene in 1780 at the new capital. It was eventually destroyed.

• 3. Jefferson's Roman Temple

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  When the legislature arrived in Richmond on the 1st of May 1780, it met in a makeshift building near Shockoe Bottom. The situation called for something more permanent, and the site chosen was Shockoe Hill, a commanding elevation overlooking the falls of the James River.

  Thomas Jefferson, then serving as governor and later as ambassador to France, took on the task of designing the new Capitol alongside French architect Charles-Louis Clérisseau. Their model was the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, an ancient Roman temple in southern France. Jefferson had Clérisseau swap the Corinthian column order of the original for the Ionic, a choice that made the design somewhat simpler and more restrained. Clérisseau then refined this further, selecting a variant of the Ionic order developed by Vincenzo Scamozzi, an Italian student of Andrea Palladio.

  The cornerstone was laid on the 18th of August 1785, with Governor Patrick Henry in attendance, before the design had even been finalized. In 1786, architectural drawings and a plaster model traveled from France to Virginia, where builder Samuel Dobie executed the construction. The General Assembly first met there in October 1792.

  The result was something almost without parallel in the United States. The Virginia State Capitol is one of only twelve state capitols in the country without an external dome. The others include Alaska, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, and Tennessee. Only one other state, Vermont, accurately copied an ancient model for its statehouse, basing the portico on the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens.

• 4. A Capitol at War

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  When Virginia seceded in 1861, Richmond became the capital of the Confederate States of America, and the Capitol on Shockoe Hill became the seat of that government for the duration of the war. It was the Confederacy's second home; the first had been the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery.

  For four years, Confederate leaders, generals, and legislators moved through those same Roman-inspired halls. The White House of the Confederacy sat about three blocks to the north on East Clay Street. The Virginia Governor's Mansion stood adjacent to the Capitol itself.

  As the war ended in April 1865, Confederate troops were ordered to burn Richmond's warehouses and factories before retreating. The fires spread out of control. The Capitol, the Governor's Mansion, and the Confederate White House all survived. A curious detail from those final days: a carpet-bag belonging to John Brown, full of documents including unpublished ones, had been kept in the Capitol from 1860 to 1865 by Andrew Hunter, then a state senator. When Richmond fell, Hunter hid the bag between the wall and the plastering so that, in his words, Yankees could not find the documents. It has never been found.

  The first United States flag to fly over the Capitol since secession was raised by Lieutenant Johnston L. de Peyster. President Abraham Lincoln toured the building during his visit to Richmond, approximately a week before his assassination in Washington. From April 6 until the 10th of April 1865, with Richmond fallen, the capital of Virginia briefly shifted to Lynchburg under Governor William Smith before the Confederacy's final collapse.

• 5. The Collapse of 1870

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  Virginia came out of the Civil War under military rule, a condition that lasted almost five years and ended in January 1870. The months that followed brought political turbulence, and a dispute over control of the Richmond city government landed before the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.

  On the 27th of April 1870, the court convened a hearing in the large courtroom on the second floor of the Capitol. Several hundred people pressed in to watch. Before the proceedings could start, the gallery gave way and crashed onto the courtroom floor. That sudden added weight, combined with the crowd already standing below, caused the entire courtroom floor to collapse, dropping forty feet into the House of Delegates chamber below.

  The scene that followed was horrific. Sixty-two people were killed and 251 injured. The dead included a grandson of Patrick Henry and three members of the General Assembly. Among the injured were both men contesting the Richmond mayoral position, the speaker of the House of Delegates, and former Confederate general Montgomery D. Corse, who was partially blinded in the collapse. No women were believed to have been present when it occurred.

  Despite public calls to demolish the building entirely, the decision was made to repair and continue. The tragedy left its mark on the political mood of the Reconstruction era, but the Capitol itself was rebuilt and eventually expanded, with two new wings added in 1904 to accommodate a growing legislature.

• 6. Renovation and Later Life

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  The two wings added in 1904 were designed by three Virginia architectural firms working in collaboration: Frye and Chesterman of Lynchburg, John Kevan Peebles of Norfolk, and Noland and Baskervill of Richmond. The additions extended the east and west ends of the original building and gave the Capitol the silhouette it has today.

  Nearly a century later, in 2003, the Virginia General Assembly approved $83.1 million for a comprehensive renovation. Work began in 2004 and finished on the 1st of May 2007. The project overhauled the entire HVAC system along with mechanical, storm water, and plumbing infrastructure. It also added a 27,000-square-foot expansion built beneath the hill on the south lawn, providing an entrance compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, office space, meeting rooms, and improved security. By the time the project closed, the final cost had risen to approximately $104 million. The underground extension was designed by architect Sonja Bijelić of RMJM.

  The Capitol had been designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960, a recognition of its architectural and historical significance. On the 24th of July 2020, House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn ordered the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee along with busts of J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederates from the historic Old House Chamber. The most recent person to lie in state there was Henry L. Marsh III, a civil rights attorney and the first African American mayor of Richmond, whose remains rested in the Capitol on the 30th of January 2025.

• 7. Capitol Square and Screen

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  The grounds surrounding the Capitol are known as Capitol Square, and they carry their own layers of history in bronze and stone. The Washington Monument at the center of the square was completed in 1869, with six figures encircling its base: Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Lewis, John Marshall, George Mason, and Thomas Nelson Jr. A bell tower on the grounds dates to 1824-1825 and is still used for ceremonial ringing.

  Later additions track the evolving sense of whose history deserves a place in the square. The Virginia Civil Rights Memorial was installed in 2008, and the Virginia Women's Monument followed in 2019. The Edgar Allan Poe Statue has stood there since 1958.

  The Capitol's classical white exterior has given it an unexpected second life on screen. For the 2000 film The Contender, starring Gary Oldman, Joan Allen, Jeff Bridges, and Christian Slater, it served as a stand-in for the exterior of the White House. In the 1993 film Dave with Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, and Frank Langella, the House of Delegates chamber became the United States House of Representatives. For the 2012 film Lincoln, the building stood in for the U.S. Capitol in Washington during Civil War-era scenes, with some digital retouching to complete the illusion. A building conceived in France, modeled on a Roman temple, and completed by Samuel Dobie in the 1790s has proven remarkably adaptable to the demands of modern storytelling.