Louisiana's Old State Capitol looks like a castle because it was designed to. When the legislature moved the seat of government from New Orleans to Baton Rouge in the 1840s, the city gave the state a bluff above the Mississippi, and the architect James H. Dakin drew a Neo-Gothic medieval castle instead of the copy of the national Capitol that most states built. Mark Twain, piloting steamboats past it in the 1850s, loathed it. In 1862, after David Farragut took New Orleans, Union troops used the building as a prison and then as a garrison, it caught fire twice, and it was left a gutted shell. William A. Freret rebuilt it by 1882, adding the spiral staircase and the stained glass dome, and the legislature met here until 1932. Restored in the 1990s, it is now a museum of Louisiana's political history at 100 North Boulevard.
The first question school children ask, Mary Durusau told WBRZ, is whether the building is haunted. Security guards have watched motion detectors go off with nobody inside, and people report doors slamming, footsteps in the chambers and the smell of cigar smoke. The usual suspect is Pierre Couvillion, a state senator in the 1800s said to have dropped dead of a heart attack after a fiery speech in the Senate and never left. The record says otherwise: he died at home in his bed in Avoyelles Parish.
Governor Henry Allen has a far better claim. He fled Louisiana after the Civil War and died in Mexico. His body was moved to New Orleans and has since come back to rest on the grounds of the Old State Capitol. Durusau reckoned he has been very quiet, and after being moved so many times is probably happy to stay in one spot.
The museum is open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, and group tours and field trips are free when booked ahead. Each October it throws Spirits of Louisiana, a party for the spirits said to walk the building and the spirits distilled across the state.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
