It’s Never Too Late: Michigan Is Driven to Save Its Capitol

Lt. Gov. Martha W. Griffiths, 77, is fond of telling the story about how she could have become part of history. She’s referring to the time a large chunk of the Capitol ceiling fell, damaging the commode in her office bathroom.

No one was there at the time. But falling sections from Michigan’s 110-year-old Capitol ceiling are not unusual.

“The Capitol is decaying and falling apart before our eyes,” said Senate press secretary Deborah Townsend. “Not only is the ceiling raining down, but chunks of limestone from the exterior of the building as well.”

Townsend, 35, was walking on the sidewalk recently when a piece of limestone from the Capitol fell to the ground, just missing her. “So far no one has been hurt by the building, as far as I know. But somebody could easily get beaned by it,” she said.

“Even the casual observer notes that architectural erosion is everywhere. Much has been destroyed, much has simply been covered up in this great Michigan treasure,” notes a leaflet issued by the Friends of the Capitol, an organization dedicated to the restoration of the Capitol.

In an effort to gain more space in the 1960s, a new floor was constructed nine feet above the original floor and the half floors were sectioned off with movable metal partitions, according to the leaflet. State workers call these extra floors “pigeon coops.”

From the outside, the new floor cuts across the center of each original tall window. Another blight is the sight of support columns, structural necessities that rise through the new “over-floor” and reach all the way to the old ceiling. The original ceiling, adorned with 19th-Century frescoes, is now obscured by a false drop ceiling of acoustical tile.

Clarence Echterling, 70, silver-haired, with an ample silver mustache, is the oldest uniformed officer in the Michigan State Police. A Capitol guard for the last 18 years, he knows the building as well as anyone working there.

Echterling was an agricultural economist before becoming a guard. He is well-known in agricultural circles in Michigan and New Zealand, where he established egg-grading and poultry standards still used today.

At 52, Echterling left agriculture to become a security guard at the Michigan Capitol. “I’m nuts about capitols,” he explained. “I’ve spent a good part of my life visiting capitols, the U.S. Capitol and every state capitol except Alaska. I have been to Ottawa and the capitols of all the Canadian provinces and have visited capitols all over the world.” Later this year, he and his wife, June, plan to visit the capitols of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

“The thing about a capitol, as I look at it, is that you can find out a lot more about a state or a country in its capitol than any other place,” Echterling said.

“I love this one best of all,” he continued, referring to the Neo-Classic Michigan Capitol. “Yet it looks worse than all the rest. It hasn’t been properly cared for. It has been abused for years. Just look at the dirt-encrusted dome. It probably hasn’t been cleaned in 50 years. And those windows painted light green. Ugh!”

But on the fourth floor, restoration of Michigan’s 1879 Capitol has begun. At a cost of $1 million, the walls and ceilings of the committee rooms were returned to their original ornate splendor last year.

When he became Senate majority leader four years ago, Republican John M. Engler, 40, said restoration of the Capitol would be one of his primary goals.

“Until then, everybody had been terrified at the mention of restoration. It meant spending of taxpayer dollars,” Deborah Townsend recalled. “But the Legislature agreed it was something that had to be done or we could lose the building.”

She rattled off a litany of problems: “Awful bus-stop furniture replacing original chairs in committee rooms, industrial paint covering ornate walls and ceilings, an etched-glass skylight with original seals of 36 states destroyed and replaced with a plywood ceiling, priceless Depression Era murals waterlogged when someone left a sprinkler system on.

“But, hopefully all this will change with restoration,” she said.

It will take time, Engler added. “This year we will spend $6 million removing the half-floor in the Senate area and restoring the chamber to what it was during the first session in 1879.”

In the past, there had been talk of tearing down the Capitol and erecting a new one. But the people of Michigan like the building. It is architecturally significant, one of the first public buildings of its type and the first capitol designed by Elijah Myers, who went on to design capitols in Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Texas.