Baton Rouge Old Capital Building

Louisiana has had capital buildings everywhere.  Mostly, the capital of Louisiana has been in either New Orleans or Baton Rouge, but it’s been in several other towns.  While sometimes the capital is in a building actually built for it, they’ve held senate and house sessions in taverns, convents, hotels, and theaters.  It seems that the capital is in Baton Rouge because they wanted a town with good transportation on the Mississippi and because New Orleans was just too tempting to state representatives and senators.  Too little work and too many scandals occurred in New Orleans!

The Old Capital is just gorgeous.  The stain glass is amazing!

 

A lot of museums have films.  Most are pretty lame.  The movie at the Old Capital was given from the viewpoint of a ghost with all kinds of special effects.  Very cool! Oh, and this capital looks like a castle. 

Mark Twain wrote about it in “Life on the Mississippi”.  At the time, the building had suffered from a fire during the Civil War.  It was being rebuilt to look as it now does.  “… is not conceivable that this little sham castle would ever have been built if he [Sir Walter Scott] had not run the people mad…It is pathetic enough, that a whitewashed castle, with turrets and things – materials all ungenuine within and without, pretending to be what they are not - should ever have been built in this otherwise honorable place: but it is much more pathetic to see this architectural falsehood undergoing restoration and perpetuation in our day, when it would have been so easy to let dynamite finish what a charitable fire began…”
 

 Just because I think it’s cool, I’m including this here.  Here’s Louis Armstrong bugle that he used as he was first learning to play.