Springfield, the capital of Illinois

Kaskaskia and Vandalia

Illinois’s first capital was Kaskaskia, an old French settlement on the Mississippi River at the southwestern corner of the state. It had been the capital of the Illinois Territory since 1809, and in 1818 it hosted the convention that wrote the first state constitution. But Kaskaskia was at the edge of a state whose settlers were moving north. In 1819 the General Assembly voted to move to Vandalia, a new town on the Kaskaskia River closer to the middle of the state, and the government arrived in 1820.

Vandalia held the capital for about twenty years and went through three statehouses. Its residents built the last one in 1836, hoping it would keep the government in town. It did not. The 1836 building still stands as the Vandalia State House State Historic Site.

Lincoln and the Long Nine

By the 1830s settlers were filling central and northern Illinois, and Springfield, in Sangamon County, was growing. Sangamon County’s delegation in the legislature, nine men nicknamed the “Long Nine” because together they stood about 54 feet tall, made moving the capital their goal. One of them was Abraham Lincoln, then a young Whig legislator in his twenties. In February 1837, only weeks after the state had taken over Vandalia’s new statehouse, the General Assembly voted to move the capital to Springfield, nearer the center of the state. The cornerstone of a new statehouse was laid on July 4, 1837, and the government moved in 1839.

That building, now the Old State Capitol, is closely tied to Lincoln. He served his last legislative term there, argued cases before the state supreme court in it, gave his “House Divided” speech there in 1858, and kept an office there as president-elect. After his assassination in 1865, his body lay in state there before burial in Springfield. Today the Old State Capitol is a state historic site, rebuilt in the 1960s.

The present Capitol

After the Civil War the old statehouse was too small, and in 1867 the legislature authorized a new Capitol, keeping the seat in Springfield despite offers from Decatur, Peoria and other cities. Ground was broken on March 11, 1868. The architects were John C. Cochrane and Alfred H. Piquenard, who was building the Iowa Capitol at the same time.

Construction dragged on. The General Assembly first met in the unfinished building on January 3, 1877. Piquenard died in 1876, and voters twice refused to approve more money before agreeing in 1884. The Chicago architect W. W. Boyington, designer of the Chicago Water Tower, finished the work, and the last bills were paid in July 1888, for a total of about $4.5 million.

The result is one of the tallest capitols in the country. Its outer dome was built 74 feet taller than the dome of the US Capitol. Inside, the inner dome holds a stained-glass oculus showing the state seal. The building’s original 1868 cornerstone cracked and was quietly buried in 1870; workers rediscovered it under the east stairs in 1944. The exterior was restored in 1983 and 1984 and the dome in 1986.

Springfield and Chicago

Springfield had about 113,000 residents in 2025, a small city compared with Chicago, whose 2.7 million people make it the largest city in Illinois by a huge margin. Springfield’s identity is bound up with Lincoln: his home, his law office, the Old State Capitol and his tomb are all there, along with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.