Topeka, the capital of Kansas

Five days at Pawnee

When Kansas Territory was organized in 1854, Governor Andrew Reeder chose a site called Pawnee, near Fort Riley in the middle of the territory, for the first legislature. It met there on July 2, 1855, in a stone building whose floors were not yet finished. The legislature, controlled by proslavery members elected with the help of voters who crossed over from Missouri, stayed only five days. Over the governor’s veto it voted to move to Shawnee Mission, near the Missouri border, and reconvened there on July 16.

Lecompton and Lawrence

The proslavery legislature then made Lecompton, on the Kansas River, the territorial capital. Lecompton gave its name to the proslavery Lecompton Constitution, which Congress rejected. Meanwhile free-state settlers set up a rival government of their own, based in Topeka and Lawrence. As antislavery Kansans gained control of the territorial legislature, its sessions moved from Lecompton to Lawrence in 1858.

Topeka wins

The free-state Wyandotte Constitution, ratified in 1859, made Topeka the temporary seat of government and required the first state legislature to put the permanent location to a popular vote. Kansas became a state on January 29, 1861, and at the general election of November 5, 1861, Topeka won the permanent capital, outpolling Lawrence by about 8,000 votes to 5,300. The Topeka Town Company, led by Cyrus K. Holliday, who later founded the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, donated the land now called Capitol Square, and the legislature accepted it on February 7, 1862.

Thirty-seven years of construction

Building the Capitol took a generation. The cornerstone of the east wing was laid in October 1866, and the building was declared complete on March 24, 1903, at a cost of about $3.2 million. The original design was by Edward Townsend Mix; John G. Haskell revised and built it.

The finished Capitol rises 306 feet, about 17 feet taller than the US Capitol. For a century its dome stood empty. A statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, was once planned for the top, but public objections to its cost and its pagan subject shelved it for good. In 2002 the dome finally got its statue: Ad Astra, a bronze Kansa warrior by Richard Bergen, aiming his bow at the North Star. It was engineered to sway no more than an inch in an 80-mile-an-hour wind. The building was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.

Inside, the Capitol keeps a working cage elevator installed in 1923. In 2016 the legislature made it the official state cage elevator and required that it be kept running.

Topeka today

Topeka had about 126,000 residents in 2025, the fifth largest city in Kansas, behind Wichita, Overland Park, Kansas City and Olathe. Lecompton, the old territorial capital, is a small town; its Constitution Hall is now a state historic site.

Visiting

Guided historic tours and dome tours run Monday through Saturday from the Capitol Visitor Center. See the Kansas Historical Society’s visitor page.