The California State Capitol took so long to build that it reportedly drove one architect to a breakdown. Hospital records attributed his collapse to 'continued and close attention to the building of the state capitol in Sacramento.' This about covers the eighteen years, several architects and one civil war needed to finish this neoclassical statehouse, its dome closely modelled on the recently rebuilt dome of the US Capitol in Washington.

Sacramento was nobody's first pick for California's capital. San Jose had mosquitoes, Vallejo had no nightlife worth the name, and Benicia's building proved too small and too poorly funded. Sacramento's own businessmen solved the problem by paying for a granite capitol themselves, and once the legislature settled at this river confluence in 1854, it never left.

VoiceMap's Gold Rush cycling tour begins on the Capitol's west steps, tracing the grid that Sutter's son and Sam Brannan laid out from here.