In 1899, St. Louis architect George R. Mann visited Governor Daniel W. Jones with an unusual sales pitch: drawings of his 1896 competition-winning design for the Montana State Capitol, which Montana had not yet built. Mann hung the drawings on the walls of the old Capitol building, and their attractiveness eased passage of appropriation bills for a new Arkansas statehouse. A seven-member commission that included future governor George W. Donaghey selected Mann as architect. Donaghey had opposed Mann and wanted a national design competition, but was outvoted. When Donaghey was elected governor in 1908, he forced Mann off the project and hired Cass Gilbert -- one of America's most prominent architects, who would later design the United States Supreme Court building -- to finish the job.

Construction ran from 1899 to 1915. The capitol rose on the site of the state penitentiary, and prisoners provided much of the labor. They lived in a dormitory left standing on the grounds while work proceeded around them. The exterior is clad in limestone quarried in Batesville, Arkansas. The original budget was set at one million dollars; the final cost reached $2.2 million -- equivalent to roughly $320 million in modern dollars. The front entrance doors, standing ten feet tall and four inches thick, are made of bronze purchased from Tiffany and Company in New York for $10,000. The structure also incorporates Yule marble, the same Colorado stone used in the Lincoln Memorial. The cupola is covered in 24-karat gold leaf, a gleaming crown visible for miles across the Arkansas River valley.

The capitol grounds carry the weight of Arkansas's complicated past. A Confederate Soldiers Monument and a Monument to Confederate Women stand alongside a Little Rock Nine Civil Rights Memorial honoring the nine Black students who integrated Central High School in 1957. A controversial Ten Commandments Monument has generated legal challenges since its installation. The grounds also include a Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, an Arkansas Fallen Firefighters Memorial, and a Liberty Bell replica. Because of its monumental dome -- so convincingly grand it passes for Washington, D.C. -- the capitol has served as a filming stand-in for the United States Capitol in several productions, including the 1986 NBC miniseries Under Siege, which left pyrotechnic stains on the dome that lingered for years.

Arkansas native Billy Bob Thornton filmed interiors of his 1999 comedy-drama Daddy and Them inside the building. The 1990 action film Stone Cold, starring Brian Bosworth, used the grounds extensively. The faith-based films God's Not Dead 2 and its sequel also filmed on the capitol grounds. For a building that began as a borrowed design from Montana, was built by prisoners on penitentiary foundations, and sits at an angle to its own street grid, the Arkansas State Capitol has proven remarkably photogenic -- its gold-leafed dome and Tiffany bronze doors projecting a grandeur that transcends the quirks of its construction.