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The cornerstone of the Wyoming State Capitol was laid in Cheyenne on May 18, 1887. It was a proud day for the citizens of Wyoming Territory and the Cheyenne Democratic Leader commented upon what was ''the occasion of the greatest military and civic demonstration ever witnessed in the history of the city.'' The building is a three and one-half story structure, about 300 feet long by 83 to 112 feet wide exclusive of approaches. The height of both the center and wings from ground to roof is about 60 feet, although the distance from the grade of the building to the top of the spire on the dome is 146 feet. The basic material used in construction of the first two courses or platform of the building is sandstone quarried at Fort Collins, Colorado, and the superstructure is of gray sandstone from quarries at Rawlins, Wyoming. The Wyoming Capitol has been, and still is, a dominant structure on the Cheyenne skyline, in addition to being historically one of the most important buildings in the State.

National Historic Landmark Nomination

The Wyoming State Capitol Building and Grounds is nationally significant under National Historic Landmark Criteria 1 and 3 for its direct association with the first, sustained instance in which a state established women’s right to vote. State constitutional delegates debated and voted upon this provision in Wyoming’s constitution in the Capitol’s Territorial House Chamber/Supreme Court Room in 1889. Under Criterion 1, the property is the site at which the territorial electorate continued the full voting rights provided to women as established in 1869 by the Territorial Legislature and where, in 1890, Wyoming became the forty-fourth state and the first to guarantee women’s suffrage. Under Criterion 3, this event and the acceptance of Wyoming into the Union in 1890 demonstrate the beginnings of what ultimately became a lengthy effort to achieve success in the women’s suffrage movement on a state-by-state basis, following on the heels of failed attempts in the 1860s to provide for women’s suffrage nationally through amendment to the US Constitution. Wyoming had been the first US Territory to secure women’s enfranchisement in 1869, and the continuation of this right into statehood reflects how Western expansion of the country during Reconstruction and afterward became a means, sometimes successfully used and other times not, by which suffragists made inroads state-by-state, a phenomenon documented in the few studies of women’s suffrage in the West. For this association with women’s history, the property was designated a National Historic Landmark on May 4, 1987; the updated documentation presented here honors that designation through the inclusion of additional scholarship and description of a recently completed wholesale restoration and rehabilitation effort.