Michigan State Capitol - Lansing, MI - Wikipedia Entries on Waymarking.com

At one time, the Capitol housed all branches of state government, including the Supreme Court, the legislature, the governor, and various state administrators, such as the attorney general and the secretary of state. On the first floor are offices where some of these agencies were located. Today, all but the governor, the lieutenant governor and the legislature have moved to other state office buildings.

The floor of the rotunda is made up of 976 pieces of glass. Each is about five-eighths of an inch thick. The floor is 44.5 feet in diameter. The floor’s design creates an optical illusion: seen from above it appears that the center of the floor sinks to form a bowl.

The rotunda rises 160 feet to an opening at the top of the inner dome. Called the oculus, or eye of the dome, it provides a glimpse into the vastness of the universe, represented by a starry sky. The rotunda and inner dome are beautifully decorated with elaborately hand-painted designs, as are the walls and ceilings throughout the Capitol. Over nine acres of hand-painted surfaces have been carefully restored to look exactly as they did originally.

Until 1990, cases circling the rotunda contained historic battle flags carried by Michigan regiments during the Civil War, as well as flags carried during the later Spanish-American War and World War I. Because of their deteriorated condition, the original battle flags were moved to the Michigan Historical Museum where they are being preserved. Replicas now take their place in the Capitol.

As a fun fact about the capitol pillars, none of them are real marble. Hand painted to fool the eye, the columns are cast iron, the pilasters are plaster, and the wainscot is pine. In this way, the opulence of the Victorian age was achieved without expensive materials, an economy necessary to keep the Capitol within its limited construction budget. In fact, one of the reasons we are on the National Register for Historic Places is in large part because of the building’s nine plus acres of Victorian decorative paint. The resulting building is a masterpiece of craftsmanship rather than merely a showcase for expensive materials.

One of the most distinctive features of the Capitol is the checkerboard black and white tiled floors in the main corridors. The white tiles are marble, but they are a relatively inexpensive marble quarried in Vermont. The black tiles are limestone, also quarried in Vermont. The black tiles are filled with fossils of marine snails and other marine animals which lived in the seas covering Vermont during the Middle Ordovician, about 475 million years ago. The large white spirals in the black tiles are the fossils of Maclurites, a large snail-like mollusk.-Michigan State Capitol Building

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