Dome
The original wood dome, which leaked, was covered with copper in 1802 by Paul Revere's company. (Paul Revere was the first American to roll copper successfully into sheets in a commercially viable manner.)
The dome was first painted gray and then light yellow before being gilded with gold leaf during 1874. During World War II, the dome was painted once again, this time black or gray (depending on the source), to prevent reflection during blackouts and to protect the city and building from bombing attacks. During 1997, at a cost of more than $300,000, the dome was re-gilded, in 23k gold.
The dome is topped with a pine cone, symbolizing both the importance of Boston's lumber industry during early colonial times and of the state of Maine, which was a district of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts when the Bulfinch section of the building was completed.
Read more about this topic: Massachusetts State House
Famous quotes containing the word dome:
“The sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came up every morning and raced across the blue dome and dipped into the sea of fire every evening. Water ran down hill and birds nested.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“But in the dome of mighty Mars the red,”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)