Beautiful Drive Around Montana Capitol Building, October Helena Montana # whyhelenmt

A Beautiful Drive Around The Montana Capitol Building In October, Helena Montana #whyhelenamtShow more

Fall drive around the Montana State Capitol Building. Beautiful sunshine with the leaves turning. Fall coming fast. The night before this drive it was 37 degree's. Just Love Fall...

A design competition for the Capitol building was conducted in 1896. The commission selected a design by George R. Mann who was the winner. In 1897, after it was found that the Commission was planning to scam money from the building project, it was disbanded and a second Capitol Commission was convened. The new Commission abandoned Mann's plan as being too costly, and had a second design competition, won by Charles Emlen Bell and John Hackett Kent, of Bell & Kent of Council Bluffs, Iowa. In order to have their design built, Bell & Kent relocated their office to Helena.
While Mann's building was never built in Montana, it was selected later as the basic design for the Arkansas State Capitol.
The winning design by Bell & Kent had been altered already during the construction phase, when in 1901 the commission asked for the structure to be made more imposing by increasing the height of the dome. Kent opposed the changes, as his original low spherical dome was meant to be "pure Greek", but Bell advocated the commission's request.
Between 1909 and 1912, the building was extended by the addition of two new wings on the eastern and western sides. This work was executed by Link & Haire, architects of Butte, with F. M. Andrews & Company of New York as consulting architects.

The Picture in the Video was of the Meagher Statue in front of the Capital of Montana.
Meagher's famous equestrian statue on the front lawn of the Montana Capitol was created by Irish-born Chicago sculptor Charles J. Mulligan. It as designed as much a tribute to the many Irish immigrants who made Montana their home as it is to Meagher himself.

Below Quote from the Montana Historical Society Website:

Thomas Francis Meagher (1823-1867) was an Irish revolutionary and Union brigadier general in the American Civil War. Known as “Meagher of the Sword,” he was exiled from Ireland to a British penal colony in Tasmania in 1848. Following his 1852 escape from Van Diemen’s Land (as Tasmania was then known), he landed in New York City, where he gained an enthusiastic following as an orator and editor of the Irish News. He arrived in Montana in 1865, having been appointed as Territorial Secretary. Over the course of the next two years he twice served as Acting Territorial Governor, drawing loyal supporters and vocal detractors in almost equal numbers. He died under mysterious circumstances in Fort Benton on July, 1, 1867. Scholars still debate whether he was murdered by political enemies or died accidentally. Irish-born Chicago sculptor Charles J. Mulligan (1866-1916) created Meagher’s equestrian statue on the front lawn of the Montana Capitol, which is as much a tribute to the many Irish immigrants who made Montana their home as it is to Meagher himself. The Meagher Memorial Association raised twenty thousand dollars by public subscription to pay for the statue, which was dedicated on July 4, 1905, before a cheering crowd of over 1,500 people.

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