Mississippi's Old Capitol opened in 1839, a Greek Revival statehouse designed by William Nichols with a limestone ground floor and a copper-plated rotunda. It served the legislature until the new capitol went up in 1903, and it is a National Historic Landmark. In 1839 the legislature became the first in the nation to give married women property rights. In January 1861 the secession convention met here and voted to take Mississippi out of the Union. In 1870 the legislature elected Hiram Revels, the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress, to the Senate.
The 1890 constitutional convention also sat here. Democrats held 134 of its 137 seats, and Isaiah T. Montgomery was the lone Black delegate. In a state where Black residents outnumbered white residents in 39 of 75 counties, the delegates added a two-dollar cumulative poll tax and a literacy test in which a registrar chose the constitutional passage to be interpreted. The aim was to minimize Black political participation. The state still operates under that constitution, as amended.
By 1900 the building was in disrepair and there was talk of tearing it down. Dunbar Rowland, the first director of the state archives, and others persuaded the legislature to restore it, and it housed state offices from 1917 to 1959. After a restoration from 1959 to 1961 it became the state historical museum, closed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and reopened in 2009. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History runs it as a free museum, a short walk from the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.
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