I hadn’t gotten to see much of Jackson the night before, so I set about it in the morning. The capitol building was less than a mile away from my motel, so it seemed like an obvious destination. While I say the capitol building was less than a mile from my motel, there were actually two capitol buildings less than a mile away from my motel. The Old Capitol is now a museum of state history, and the New Capitol replaced the Old Capitol as the functioning house of the state government in 1903. I drove to the New Capitol in about as quickly as the state leaders had decided on the names for the buildings back at the turn of the twentieth century.
“Well boys, now that we’re moving from this old capitol building to the new one, how will we and future generations possibly tell them apart?”
“Um, sir, maybe we could call the old capitol building Old Capitol, and the new one New Capitol.”
“My God, Richardson, that’s the kind of thinking that will make us the greatest state in this nation.”
