Sacramento, the capital of California

Why Sacramento?

Sacramento did not win because it was the biggest or the most central city. It won because it kept offering a building when the others could not. In the early 1850s towns competed to host the new government by promising it land and meeting halls. Most of those promises fell short. Sacramento offered its county courthouse, the Legislature accepted in 1854, and the city then spent years defending the prize.

Five moves in five years

San Jose, 1849 to 1851. The constitutional convention that met at Colton Hall in Monterey in 1849 chose San Jose as the first capital. The first Legislature met there in December 1849, in a two-story adobe building, even before Congress admitted California as a state. Lawmakers disliked it from the start: the Capitol Museum describes the building as poorly lit and badly ventilated.

Vallejo, 1852. General Mariano Vallejo offered land and a new capitol in the town that bears his name. When the Legislature arrived on January 5, 1852, the building was not finished and lacked basic amenities. Lawmakers stayed a week.

Sacramento, 1852. The Legislature moved to Sacramento for the rest of the session and met in the rented county courthouse. A severe flood in March 1852 damaged the state’s records.

Vallejo again, 1853. The Legislature went back to Vallejo in January 1853, found the building still unready, and left again within a month. Vallejo was accused of breaking his contract with the state.

Benicia, 1853 to 1854. Benicia’s new City Hall, a two-story brick building, was a real improvement, and the Legislature met there for a year from February 1853. The town was too small for a state government, though.

Sacramento for good, 1854. In February 1854 the Legislature returned to Sacramento and stayed. Even that move was contested. J. D. Hoppe got a court order to keep the state archives from leaving, on the grounds that San Jose was still the true legal capital, and two more removal acts were needed before the question was settled. Five months later, on July 3, 1854, fire destroyed the courthouse the Legislature had been meeting in.

What about Monterey?

Monterey often turns up on lists of former capitals. It was the capital of Spanish and Mexican California, and after the Mexican-American War it was the seat of the US military government from 1848 to 1849. The constitutional convention also met there. But the state government never sat in Monterey, and the Capitol Museum states that it was never a state capital.

The fights to move it

Sacramento’s hold on the capital stayed shaky for decades. Oakland tried to take it in 1858 and 1859. San Jose tried again from 1875 to 1878, in 1893 and in 1903, Berkeley in 1907, and Monterey from 1933 to 1941. All of these bids failed. What kept the capital in place was the building: once Sacramento’s residents had taxed themselves to buy the land, and the state had spent millions on a permanent Capitol, moving became much harder to justify.

Building the Capitol

Work began in 1860 on a block between 10th and 12th Streets and L and M Streets. The design came from Miner F. Butler. Reuben Clark took over as architect, and the work later passed to Gordon P. Cummings and others. The project went badly over budget: planned at $500,000, it cost about $2.45 million by the time it was finished on March 31, 1874. The Legislature had already moved into its new chambers in December 1869.

Two things from the build are still visible. Floods in the winter of 1861 to 1862 were so bad that the Legislature moved to San Francisco for the rest of the session, and the builders then raised the ground around the Capitol, so the original first floor is now the basement. On the west front, the lower walls are dark granite from Folsom and the upper walls lighter granite from Rocklin. The switch came in 1864, during a rivalry between the two railroads that served the quarries.

The job broke at least one of its architects. Reuben Clark was committed to the state asylum in Stockton in 1865, and his hospital records blamed overwork on the Capitol. He died the next year.

Saving it in the 1970s

By the 20th century the building had been changed a great deal. Its grand staircases were taken out in 1906 for offices and elevators. Later work covered the legislative chambers with white paint, fluorescent lights and lowered ceilings, and an annex was added on the east side, finished in 1951. Then a 1971 seismic report concluded that the old Capitol could not survive a strong earthquake.

The state chose to save it instead of replacing it. Restoration started in the mid-1970s and took six years, while the Legislature met in trailers in Capitol Park. The cost was about $67 million, and the Capitol Museum says it was the largest restoration ever completed in North America at the time. Workers cleaned and relaid around 600,000 pieces of the original poppy-tile mosaics, rebuilt the staircases by hand and recreated the chamber carpets from an 1870 photograph. The building reopened in January 1982.

Sacramento compared with California’s big cities

Sacramento had about 536,000 residents in 2025, which makes it only the sixth largest city in California. Los Angeles, the largest, has about 3.9 million. San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco and Fresno are also bigger. Like many state capitals, Sacramento was picked for what it could offer the government in the 1850s, not for how large it might grow.

Visiting

The Capitol is open to the public, and admission and guided tours are free. Several offices used by the state’s early officials have been re-created as museum rooms. See the California State Capitol Museum for hours and tours.