Sunlight catches a dome of gold leaf above you, crowning the Georgia State Capitol, completed in 1889 as one of the nation's most distinctive statehouses. The dome is covered in gold leaf mined from Dahlonega, Georgia — a tradition honoring the 1828 gold rush in the North Georgia mountains, the first major gold rush in American history. The building was constructed in the High Victorian Romanesque style, and its grounds contain statues of Georgia figures including Jimmy Carter, Georgia's only president of the United States, who served from 1977 to 1981.
The capitol sits on land that has been the center of Georgia government since Atlanta replaced Milledgeville as the state capital in 1868, during Reconstruction, when the occupying Union Army moved Georgia's government to the railroad hub that was rapidly becoming the state's economic center. Georgia's postwar political history is long and complicated — it was here that Reconstruction was resisted, that Jim Crow was legislated, and that the Civil Rights era played out in the halls of power as much as in the streets outside. Georgia's transformation into a competitive two-party state, culminating in two Democratic Senate victories in January 2021, was a political earthquake decades in the making.
That story runs through this building.