Exhibits at the State Capitol
By Kylie L. McCormick
When lawmakers gathered at the Wyoming Capitol this Tuesday for an intimate swearing-in ceremony, they met in a room that looked much like it did in 1888. In 1888, the room served as the chamber for the Territorial House of Representatives. The next year delegates gathered there to draft our constitution. After statehood, the Wyoming Supreme Court met in this room until 1937.
The effort to rehabilitate and restore the Capitol first began in 2003. By then, the Capitol had lost much of its historic grandeur. Large hallways with arched ceilings had become narrow corridors with dropped ceilings to accommodate more offices and modern heating. Decorative pillars in a large room that once held the State Library were walled up and the space was split into many different offices. Stained glass laylights that once let in natural light were covered by the dropped ceilings and replaced with fluorescent lighting. Big windows in the House chamber were walled in. Vaults at the garden level that once featured beautiful pastoral paintings set in art deco style framing had been painted many times over.
Despite being one of the few state capitols designated as a National Historic Landmark due to our 1889 Constitutional Convention—which wrote a state constitution guaranteeing votes for women—the building was much changed from how it looked that September when the men met to draft our founding document. In 2003, the legislature decided to start saving money to save our Capitol.
Work on the building finally finished in 2019. Then the next phase of the project began: an interpretive exhibit throughout the Capitol to detail Wyoming history along with the work of the rehabilitation and restoration of the Capitol. Wendy Madsen, the special projects manager in the Legislative Service Office, described the exhibit as “the icing on the cake.”
A company out of Kansas City, Dimensional Innovations, won the bid to design the exhibit and began contracting with a team out of Oregon to write the text for these exhibits. When the Oregon team contacted Tom Rea and me in the summer of 2023 with a question about Wyoming’s woman suffrage, I found myself a little frustrated—shouldn’t Wyoming historians have the honor to interpret our state history in the Capitol?
Fortunately, the Joint Capitol Interpretive Exhibits and Wayfinding Subcommittee agreed when the director of the State Museum, Kevin Ramler, suggested that they hire WyoHistory.org and the Wyoming Historical Society to write the exhibit texts instead.
Since the fall of 2023, Tom and I have worked with the great team at Dimensional Innovations and the core team at the Capitol to develop and create exhibits. The project has proven to be much bigger than we could have ever imagined. A year later, installation of the exhibits around the Capitol finally began. While the project is still not finished—we are starting the reviews of the digital exhibits now—much of the physical exhibit is installed, just in time for the 68th Wyoming Legislative Session.
If you are visiting the Capitol to watch or participate in this legislative session, please take a stroll through those hallowed halls. While you are taking in the details of the restoration, read along to find out what makes that building and Wyoming so special.
Read about Wyoming’s Constitutional Convention