Interior
The House chamber on the first floor is rather simple and featured mahogany desks and leather chairs. The room eventually accommodated 106 representatives from 16 states: the 13 original states as well as the representatives from the new states of Vermont in 1791, Kentucky in 1792, and Tennessee in 1796. The room has been restored to its original appearance in 1796.
The second floor, reserved as the chamber for the Senate, was more ornate and adorned with heavy red drapes. By 1796, the room featured 32 secretary desks very similar to the desks that are still used in the current Senate chamber in the United States Capitol; 28 of the desks at Congress Hall are original. Portraits of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, presented as gifts from the French monarch following the American Revolution, hang in adjoining committee rooms. A fresco of an American Bald Eagle is painted on the ceiling, holding the traditional olive branch to symbolize peace. Also on the ceiling, a plaster medallion in the form of a sunburst features 13 stars to represent the original colonies. The design mirrors a similar pattern on the floor, where a carpet made by William Sprague, a local weaver, features the shields of each of the 13 original states. The carpet seen today is a reproduction of the original.
Read more about this topic: Congress Hall
Famous quotes containing the word interior:
“An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.”
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941)
“It cannot but affect our philosophy favorably to be reminded of these shoals of migratory fishes, of salmon, shad, alewives, marsh-bankers, and others, which penetrate up the innumerable rivers of our coast in the spring, even to the interior lakes, their scales gleaming in the sun; and again, of the fry which in still greater numbers wend their way downward to the sea.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Alas! when Virtue sits high aloft on a frigate’s poop, when Virtue is crowned in the cabin of a Commodore, when Virtue rules by compulsion, and domineers over Vice as a slave, then Virtue, though her mandates be outwardly observed, bears little interior sway.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)