Georgia State Capitol
by Joan Carroll
Title
Georgia State Capitol
Artist
Joan Carroll
Medium
Photograph - Digital Photograph
Description
Downtown Atlanta on a Saturday afternoon is pretty deserted and quiet and Miss Freedom seems to be holding a lonely vigil over the Georgia state capitol building. Or perhaps she is just guarding the gold of the dome! When the capitol building was first build completed in 1889, the come was constructed from terra cotta and covered with tin! In a 1958 renovation, the present dome was gilded with native gold leaf from near Dahlonega in Lumpkin County, where the first American gold rush occurred during the 1830s. It is estimated that it took 43 oz of gold to cover the roof, milled into gold leaf 1/5,000th of an inch thick. The gold was expected to last thirty or forty years. Unfortunately, the gold was applied during the winter months, and the engineers were unaware that gold leaf does not bond properly when it is applied during cold weather. The thinness of the gold leaf also made it susceptible to wearing away from oxidation and weather. By 1977, only nineteen years after its application, almost half of the gold was gone from the dome. Concern over the disappearing gold and the dome's appearance led a number of Georgians and state officials to explore how the dome might be regilded. The Dahlonega�Lumpkin County Jaycees committed their organization to raising the gold for the project, as they had done in the late 1950s, with overall responsibility for regilding to be assumed by the Georgia Building Authority. By 1981 the total regilding of the capitol dome was complete. Gold leaf is very thin and vulnerable to heat, wind, and rain damage, so by the 1990s flaking was again occurring on the dome. Today, rather than waiting until the damage is visible from the ground, the Georgia Building Authority now repairs the damage as it occurs. Only ten other states have capitol domes covered with gold leaf: Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Of these, the gilded domes of Iowa and Georgia are the largest. Atop Georgia's capitol is a statue of a woman with a torch in one hand and a sword in the other. Who she is, what she represents, and how she came to adorn the capitol is something of a mystery. In an Atlanta Constitution newspaper account written during the construction of the capitol, Captain W. H. Harrison, the secretary of the board of capitol commissioners, refers to the statue as the "Goddess of Liberty." In recent decades, however, she has been referred to as "Miss Freedom."
FEATURED PHOTO, Showcasing The South group, 4/17/19
FEATURED PHOTO, Landscape and Landmark Photography group, 9/22/14
FEATURED PHOTO, Abc Group - A Is For Anything group, 9/21/14
Uploaded
September 21st, 2014
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Viewed 4,064 Times - Last Visitor from New York, NY on 03/27/2024 at 2:24 AM
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