Lincoln's Old Capitol: The Springfield Room Where Illinois Argued With Itself

Before the dome, there was the stone box. The Old State Capitol in Springfield — Greek Revival, built of local limestone in 1837-1840 to a design by John Francis Rague — served as Illinois' statehouse from 1840 to 1876, and it is preserved today as the Old State Capitol State Historic Site.

The building's résumé is unmatched in Illinois. Abraham Lincoln served his last term as a state lawmaker here in 1840-41, argued cases before the state supreme court in its chambers, and in 1858 announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in the House chamber with the address that began, 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' After his assassination, Lincoln's body lay in state in the building he had known so well.

The capitol the visitor sees today is a feat of preservation engineering. By the 1960s the building, then serving as a courthouse, was carefully taken down to its stone shell and rebuilt around a modern structure, with the exterior restored and the interiors reconstructed to their appearance around 1860.

The site's modern history rhymes with its old one: in 2007, Barack Obama stood at the Old State Capitol to announce his run for the presidency, deliberately choosing the ground where Lincoln had launched his own national career a century and a half earlier.

For Illinoisans heading to the polls on Tuesday, the Old Capitol is the state's civic memory in physical form — a reminder that the arguments conducted through ballots this week have been running, in these rooms and their successors, since before the Civil War.