The Associated Press
Mississippi lawmakers are beginning their 2009 session with a nod to the past, convening at noon Tuesday for a brief ceremony in the freshly renovated Old Capitol in downtown Jackson.
“The building is the epitome of history,” said House Speaker Billy McCoy, D-Rienzi.
The former statehouse was the cradle of Mississippi government from 1839 to 1903. It sits just a few blocks from the 106-year-old “new” Capitol, a larger and more ornate structure where lawmakers normally conduct business and where they’ll work the rest of the three-month session to write a budget and set policies that affect people’s everyday lives.
Legislators probably will spend only an hour or two at the Old Capitol, and Republican Gov. Haley Barbour said he’ll visit the House and Senate chambers. Barbour also is expected to receive visitors in the governor’s office on the first floor, a museum space with portraits of state’s past executives who served there.
Tuesday’s events are open to the public, but parking and seating are limited.
The Old Capitol’s grand opening is set for Feb. 7. Crews are completing some of the exhibits inside the building, and landscaping and some exterior work remains to be done.
The building fell into disrepair for several years after the new Capitol opened; a black-and-white photo now on display shows vines growing through an open window into the Senate chamber in 1915. State archives officials say the Old Capitol was saved from the wrecking ball more than once. It was used for state government offices and became a Mississippi history museum, undergoing renovation in 1961.
The museum has been closed for repairs for more than three years because of Hurricane Katrina, a storm noted mostly for the devastation it caused along the Gulf Coast.
The building opens with a new mission _ a greater emphasis on teaching visitors about the workings of government and about the importance of historic preservation. Most of the state history exhibits and the gift shop have been moved out; officials plan to build a state history museum a few blocks away when legislators approve bonds to finance the project.
Katrina blew ashore on Aug. 29, 2005, and it still had hurricane-force winds as it moved through Jackson, some 175 miles inland. The storm peeled parts of the copper roof off the Old Capitol.
Lucy Allen, director of the museum division for the state Department of Archives and History, said she was home the day of Katrina and received a phone call from a police officer telling her water was pouring into the structure.
The next day, about 30 staff members reported to work to try to save what they could. Allen said they formed an assembly line inside the Old Capitol and spent four solid days, 8 a.m.-5 p.m., moving items to a safer part of the building.
Problems were compounded four weeks later, when Hurricane Rita dumped more rain inside the Old Capitol. Industrial-strength dehumidifiers sucked trash cans full of water from the air inside the building, and it quickly became clear that major repairs were needed.
The post-Katrina restoration has cost about $16.5 million. About $14 million was financed by state-issued bonds. Mississippi also received a $525,000 grant last year from the National Park Service.
One of the most noticeable changes has been made on the outside front of the building. Red bricks that had been visible since 1961 are now covered with a stucco facade that looks like limestone, a return to the building’s 19th Century appearance.
The Greek revival-style Old Capitol was designed by architect William Nichols, whose other notable buildings include the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion and the Lyceum, the main administrative building at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.
The Old Capitol was the site of several significant events, including the vote by a Secession Convention on Jan. 9, 1861, that made Mississippi the second Southern state to break ties with the Union before the Civil War.
In January 1980, when the “new” Capitol was undergoing extensive renovation, Gov. William Winter was supposed to be inaugurated outside the Old Capitol. Because of heavy rain, the ceremony was moved inside the building, and McCoy recalled that the hallways reverberated as opera star Leontyne Price, a Mississippi native, sang the National Anthem.
Several notable Mississippians have lain in state or in repose in the Old Capitol, including Confederate Gen. William Barksdale, who died in 1863; Gov. J.P. Coleman, who died in 1991; and author Eudora Welty, who died in 2001.
Allen said Mississippi had 27 state senators in 1839. Now, there are 52. Officials haven’t been able to determine the number of House members in 1839, but Allen said there were 88 in 1902, when lawmakers last met in the Old Capitol. The House now has 122 members.
The Legislature is also considerably more diverse than it was during the 19th Century, with about 50 members who are black and about two dozen who are women.
Although most of the historical events in the building took place at a time when black people were excluded from government, the Old Capitol was the site of a significant ceremony on April 25, 2002. A racially mixed crowd of nearly 200 people gathered that day as Myrlie Evers-Williams gave the state Department of Archives and History a collection of letters, speeches and notes written by her late husband, Medgar Evers, the Mississippi NAACP leader who was assassinated outside the family’s Jackson home in June 1963. She also donated some of her own papers and photographs.
“This is where they belong,” Evers-Williams said.
Winter, a longtime member of the Archives and History Board of Trustees, said at the ceremony that Medgar Evers “gave his life in his quest to free us all _ black and white folks alike _ from the bondage of racial segregation and discrimination. He was a true hero.”
McCoy, the 62-year-old speaker of the House, said he has long been fascinated by the Old Capitol. He started traveling to Jackson more than a half century ago to watch legislative sessions when he was a child and his father, Elmer McCoy, served in the House.
“I’ve often wondered _ even as a fairly young fella coming here with my father, when we’d come in and see that Old Capitol _ what it must’ve been like for a legislator in the 1800s to get on a horse or a buggy or, God forbid, walk from very far.
“I wondered about what they felt like when they rounded the curve, coming from whatever direction, and saw that dome and knew that was going to be the place they were going to do work for some several weeks or months,” McCoy said.
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