Capital of the Evergreen State (by William)

Live from Spring Break Road Trip (March 27, 2018)

It has been raining non-stop since our plane landed in Portland, Oregon Saturday night.  We decided to spend our day in the Washington State Capital.  It turned out to be a great learning experience.  Let me share three stories the tour guide Linda Moon told us.

The first one was a very funny story about the creation of the Washington State Seal.  One day, Charles Talcott was thinking about what the state seal should be.  He had the cold and reached for his medicine bottle.  On the bottle was a picture of George Washington.  The medicine bottle gave him an idea.  He traced a silver dollar to get a circle then drew Washington’s face inside just as the one on the medicine bottle.   
  

The second story was about the Tiffany glass chandeliers. A standard chandelier in the legislative building weighs one ton and the heaviest one weights five tons (10,000 pounds).  The light bulbs on the heaviest one are the same kind of bulbs used for traffic lights since they can last very long.  Someone in our tour group noticed a light bulb was broken.  Linda explained the old way for the technician to fix the chandelier was to balance walk on a cable.  Nowadays safety nets are installed underneath to protect the technicians.    
 

 

The third story was about the marble wall and floors.  The marbles came from different regions of the world—Alaska, Italy, Belgium, Germany, and France.  In the Reception room, there are many patterns on the marble wall, and I was able to spot a butterfly, a dog, and a river.
 

 

I also followed two classes of 5^th graders from local schools into the Temple of Justice and listened in a mock trial.  This was a day I visited offices all three branches--Legislative, Executive, and Judicial of the government.