Colorado – The Lone Skier

The Columns
The Colorado capitol has columns all around the lower drum section below its dome. This is a common place for columns, but Colorado's are unique.

Most of the capitols with drum columns have one circle of single or paired columns all the way around the drum. Just a few, Washington, Michigan, and Colorado, also have pairs of columns set outside of the main column circle. Washington has six or eight pairs with none of them centered over the front entrance (see below, left). Michigan and Colorado have four pairs that are centered over the front and rear entrances and over the wings. Only Colorado has a small, arched pediment over each advanced pair of columns. Those two columns over the entrance with the arch on top are unique to Colorado.

Michigan's pair of columns seems to blend in with the rest of the drum, while Colorado's are much more noticeable because of the arched pediment. It is a feature that literally stands out in most images of the Colorado capitol.

Michigan image courtesy of Aunt Owwee

image courtesy of Onetwo1 and Wikipedia

An Association
Now just imagine the arch over those stand-out columns in front as a person's head and shoulders, and the columns themselves as his ski poles. They form a skier with his head tucked down and his legs bent as he skis right down to the portico roof of the Colorado capitol.

Associating a skier with Colorado is not difficult. The Rocky Mountains are such a huge part of Colorado's terrain, I believe everyone connects Colorado with mountains. Most probably also connect Colorado mountains with

skiing, thanks to famous places like Aspen and Vail. So the capitol with the skier over the entrance is in Rocky Mountain ski country, Colorado.

Georgia – The Lady in the Windows

The windows in the drum (and cupola) of this capitol resemble people. Imagine the circular ones as heads with the tall, rectangular ones below them as their bodies. These are nearly unique as capitol drum windows. The Illinois and Texas capitols have similar ones that are not as visible behind the columns on their drums. Georgia's columns are very close to the drum wall, so the windows are a prominent feature.

An Association
The people-shaped windows are easy to associate with a person's name. Georgia is a person's name, and it is a more commonly used one than that of any other state. So the lady in the drum windows is Georgia.

composite image
(originals pictured below)

A change of color
The dome was tin-colored until it was renovated and gilded in about 1957.

image courtesy of
J.W. Douglasville, GA

See the front portico?
The capitol is set close to surrounding buildings, and its front is hidden by trees. The highway in the background leaves the rear of the building much more easily visible.

Why a composite?
Georgia's capitol building is located on a hill in Atlanta, the capital city. As you can see in the image at left, it is set near large buildings and is landscaped with large trees. It seems it is hard to get a good, complete photo of the front. The most photographed side is the back, and when the front is pictured, I have always found the image incomplete. I have taken the front portico from one image and placed it on a rear image of the whole building to create the composite picture of the whole front. The original images are below.

Indiana – The Snakes

Most often, the only part of the Indiana capitol you see in photos is the front entrance or a side entrance, either with the dome. The building is located very close to much taller ones in Indianapolis. The image of the whole building at right is very unusual, and it is a bit distorted, but worth it.

The drum of this capitol has rondels (circular, sculpted decorations) in the main section and round windows in the top section that are unique. Other capitols have similar features, but not with the sculptured trim you see here. The stone wreath or garland almost seems to flow out of the round windows, especially since it gets thicker toward the bottom and seems to hang down.

The trim at the top edge of the drums that continues the ribs of the drums upward and stands out white against the green copper dome is also unusual. Utah's capitol has a copper dome with drum trim that sticks up in front of it, so it has a similar effect, but the trim is shaped differently and the windows in that drum are square.

image courtesy of Massimo Catarinella
through a Creative Commons Deed

The Snakes?
When snakes burrow into the ground, they frequently leave a deposit of mud, sand or other earth around the outside of the hole. As the image at right shows, this creates an effect very similar to the sculpted trim around the Indiana capitol drum windows. Also, each set of the trim and ribs on the Indiana drum mentioned earlier is similar in shape to the head and body of a snake.

An Association
To connect Indiana to snakes, you only need to be familiar with the highly popular Indiana Jones movie series. "Indy" is a very adventurous Professor of Archaeology who happens to be afraid of snakes due to a close encounter as a child. This fear is a recurring theme in the movies, frequently with a humorous twist. So the capitol with the snakes and their holes is in snake-fearing Indy's namesake, Indiana.

Kansas – The Stacked Houses

The Drums
This capitol has a unique drum configuration below the copper dome. First, the two main drum sections are octagonal in shape, which is not unique (Maryland, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Wyoming have octagonal drums) but certainly is unusual, especially for as large a dome as Kansas has. Second, there are two drums stacked on each other, which is unique among the octagonal drums of our capitols. And third, the windows are different in the two drum sections. No other capitol has drums like these.

The angular, octagonal shape of the Kansas drums lends itself to an unusual image; they could be parts of a much more common building than a circular drum would be. With a bit of imagination, they could even be parts of a house. The two sections are visually separated with ornamentation and appear stacked, which would be an unusual house but is not impossible. When the difference in the windows in the two drum sections is added to the picture, the imagined, stacked house becomes an even more imaginative stack of two different houses.

image courtesy of KansasPhoto (Patrick)

An Association
Now how could two different houses end up stacked like the Kansas drums? If one was lifted onto the other. Lifting it with heavy equipment wouldn't be much help in our association. We need to imagine the top house was lifted and dropped onto the bottom one by a tornado. That is how Dorothy's house traveled to Oz in the movie, The Wizard of Oz, and very soon after it landed, Dorothy said, "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."

That is one of the most famous lines from one of the most beloved movies of all time. Dorothy was from Kansas. While Dorothy's tornado-dropped house was not in Kansas anymore, our tornado-dropped drum is in Kansas.

Wyoming and Montana – Anne and Anna

The Windows
The capitols of Wyoming and Montana have distinctive and easily visible windows in their drums; half rounds above the rectangles. Other capitols have similar ones, but they are hidden behind columns and not easy to see.

The drum windows of the Georgia capitol discussed earlier on this page have full circles above the rectangles, and we think of them as lady-shapes. The Wyoming and Montana windows also resemble ladies, but with something covering the bottom halves of their faces, resulting in the half-round shapes for the heads.

More unique features
Montana's capitol has an unusual drum and dome arrangement. It is the only one where the main drum under a dome is square. In the image below on the right, small domes can be seen over the corners of the square drum.

Wyoming's drum is also unusual; you can see through it in many images (though not in those used here). Cupolas or lanterns are often see-through, but Wyoming's airy drum and gilded dome are not considered a cupola.

Wyoming
image courtesy of David Simmons

Montana
image courtesy of Mike Bechtol

image courtesy of
Donald L. Mark

An Association, well two, really
To connect the lady-with-her-face-covered windows to their locations, first we need to give them names. We'll use "Anne" and "Anna," names very similar to each other so they are easy to remember together.

In the Wyoming drum, the airy, smaller drum with the gilded dome, we have Anne, a delicate city girl who is covering her face below her eyes because she is shy.
Shy Anne - Cheyenne is the capital of Wyoming.

Then in the Montana drum, the solid block with the mountainous black main dome and the small, 'foothills' domes at the corners, we have Anna, a substantial wilderness woman who has her face covered below her eyes because it is cold and windy where she lives in the mountains.
Mountain Anna - Mont-ana.

detail from image above