To wit: In the late 1700's, a man who had a fruit cart on State St. to feed the workers (this was way before food trucks, or really, trucks) was down on his luck. You have to sell a lot of apples and pears to make ends meet. So one day he tells his son he's going inside the Capitol building to get some supplies from their storage closet. So in he goes, but he never comes out! He climbs to the third floor of the center stone staircase and jumps 70 feet to his death. Greta snapped a photo to show where he landed. As Fred said, his head cracked like an egg on the stone floor. The saddest part of the story? Nobody told his son that day! He waited for hours outside, then packed up the cart and wheeled it home. The next morning he reads the paper to learn his father killed himself.
Another good story -- one of the stone masons who worked on the Million Dollar Staircase was fired. The staircase is really quite impressive with thousands of animals and faces and other objects carved into stone. Each archway is unique, each bannister crammed with weird stuff. But there's only one devil, which the fired mason carved without permission into what amounts to not-quite crown molding lining a hallway. Here it is in context:
And here, in detail. It's only about an inch wide. But that's enough to curse the Capitol!
In all, 32 people died during construction of the building, which was then partially destroyed during a fire in 1911. Night watchman Sam Abbott, the only casualty of the fire, died in a Senate hallway a short stroll from the main chamber. It is said he still haunts it, creaking open doors in the middle of the night to make sure everyone can get out if it ever happens again.
Actually he locks doors to make sure the fire doesn't spread.
ReplyDelete~Greta Merrill