Visiting The Arizona Capitol Museum In Phoenix, AZ

We’ve had the opportunity to visit a lot of State Capitol buildings on our 50 state road trip so far.

In fact, we’ve visited every one in each state that we’ve visited so far, other than Georgia’s because we made a bit of a mistake.

Every State Capitol building has been interesting in its own way, with one of the nicest being the Vermont State House in Montpelier.

But none have been quite as interesting as the Arizona Capitol Museum. The Old Capitol is used as a museum to the history of Arizona and it’s incredibly interesting. Best of all – it’s free!

With four floors of exhibits ranging from the History of Arizona and Statehood, to Women’s Voting Rights, visiting the Historic Senate and House Chambers and artifacts from the USS Arizona that was sunk in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, there’s tons to fill an afternoon. I did a flying visit in just over an hour, but I left with so much great information.

One of the most interesting things I learned while I was there was that Arizona built this State Capitol building BEFORE it was even a state. They wanted to prove their territory was ready for statehood and so they commissioned this building.

Like most capitols it does have a dome, but it’s not very grand.

Like many State Capitols there’s a State Seal in the floor. There’s information all about it and you can get a great view from above on each of the four floors.

You can even see old blueprints of the building

The Executive Tower was added on and that’s where the day-to-day business of the Governor takes place, while the House and Senate have separate buildings outside.

One exhibit I found particularly interesting was the “old-timey” voting machine and the information about women’s suffrage in Arizona. They didn’t include a women’s right to vote in the state constitution because they didn’t think President Taft would sign off on it, so at the first election after statehood it was added to the ballot. Find out the outcome of the vote below.

Woohoo! Women got the right to vote in 1912 in AZ

There’s also an extensive exhibit in the old House of Representatives chambers about trying to gain statehood for Arizona. There were many that wanted New Mexico and Arizona admitted as one state, but the people of Arizona weren’t part of that group – they wanted to be a state in their own right.

They had to update their constitution, but eventually President Taft signed the approval for statehood on February 14, 1912.

The Old House of Representative Chambers is in the Arizona Capitol Museum rather than being in a separate building where the new Chambers are.

One of the coolest things I learned that I shared with my students on my virtual field trips was that the colors for Democrats and Republicans were once switched as you can see on these old name plates. Even as recently as the ’80s and ’90s the colors were reversed. It wasn’t until the 2000 election that Tim Russert showed which states went to Democrats and which went to Republicans as blue and red respectively that the switch became official.