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.

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