Des Moines, the capital of Iowa

Burlington and Iowa City

When Congress created the Iowa Territory in 1838, its first capital was Burlington, a river town on the Mississippi that had already hosted the legislature of the Wisconsin Territory. In 1841 the government moved inland to Iowa City, a new town laid out as the capital. Its stone capitol, a Greek Revival building, served the territory and then the new state from 1846. When the government left, the building was handed to the State University of Iowa, and today it is the university’s Old Capitol.

Moving west

Soon after statehood, lawmakers decided that the capital should be farther west, to match the way Iowa was filling up. The first General Assembly set up a commission in 1846 to find a site. It chose a spot in Jasper County, but that choice was later dropped.

In 1854 the General Assembly settled on the area within two miles of the Raccoon fork of the Des Moines River. The exact site was fixed when an early settler, Wilson Alexander Scott, gave the state nine and a half acres of land, the ground where the Capitol stands today. Des Moines residents put up a temporary statehouse, which the state later bought, and in 1857 Governor James W. Grimes proclaimed Des Moines the capital. The state’s records were moved there from Iowa City, and the General Assembly first met in Des Moines in January 1858.

A temporary building for thirty years

The temporary statehouse ended up serving for about thirty years while a permanent Capitol was designed and built. The architects were John C. Cochrane and A. H. Piquenard, the same pair who designed the Illinois Capitol; the work was finished under M. E. Bell and W. F. Hackney.

Construction had a rocky start. The cornerstone was first laid on November 23, 1871, but much of the original stone failed, and the cornerstone had to be laid again on September 29, 1873. The building was dedicated in January 1884, and the building commission filed its final report in 1886. In 1904 a fire in the north wing wrecked the House chamber while the building was being modernized.

The Capitol

The Iowa State Capitol is crowned by a central dome covered in gold leaf, topped by a lookout lantern whose finial stands 275 feet above the ground floor. Four smaller domes rise at the corners, giving the building its distinctive five-domed outline. Inside, the builders used 29 kinds of imported and domestic marble, along with walnut, cherry, catalpa, butternut and oak from Iowa and other Midwestern forests.

Des Moines today

Des Moines had about 212,000 residents in 2025, the largest city in Iowa, ahead of Cedar Rapids and Davenport. Iowa City, the old capital, is now best known as the home of the University of Iowa.

Visiting

Free guided tours of the Capitol are offered Monday through Saturday, and visitors may also explore on their own. See the Iowa Legislature’s tour page.