Cass Gilbert

The sustained period of economic stability they initiated delivered peace to the Western democracies for over 80 years.

Designed by Cass Gilbert and commissioned by the entrepreneur Frank Winfield Woolworth, creator and owner of nearly 600 nationwide five-and-dime stores, the Woolworth building was 792 feet tall and towered majestically into the Manhattan sky.

Who, seeing this, could possibly doubt the astonishing age of progress in which Americans now lived? Across the Atlantic, London might have been usurped as the busiest port in the world, but it remained the beating hub of the largest empire ever to have existed and, more to the point, the largest trading empire.

Britain had global extra-imperial assets and interests beyond the boundaries of her empire.

But Wyatt Hibbs was given a sketch or an older photograph of a building that was in Waterbury, Connecticut, and it was one of their municipal buildings.

It was designed by Cass Gilbert, who was a regional architect up there, very well known.

And he was given that and he drew the first sketches of this building.

Now the end sketches and designs were done by Northup and O'Brien who was left, but he had designed it.

Welcome to The History Project.

Today we take a look at Cass Gilbert and the design of the new Capitol in West Virginia State Capitol, Part 2.

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.

So begins Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem about the warrior king, celebrating his palace, the capital of his government, reminding us that great architecture is used to reflect great people.

After fire destroyed West Virginia's Capitol in 1921, state leaders thought to replace it with a landmark, so they summoned Cass Gilbert, made famous by his first triumph, Minnesota's State Capitol, in St. Paul in 1905.

Gilbert's grand structures dotted the country.

St. Louis's Art Museum and its public library, Newark's Essex County Courthouse, Arkansas State Capitol and Little Rock, and the gold standard of skyscrapers, New York's Woolworth America's first celebrity architect came to Charleston to create a masterpiece.