Helena, Montana

We left Washington on May 1st, giving ourselves about two weeks to meander back to Hillman, Michigan, with stops along the way to three more state capitals: Helena, Montana, Pierre, South Dakota, and Madison, Wisconsin. We arrived in Helena on May 2nd, and toured the capitol and the town on the 3rd.

From the outside, the capitol building gave no hint of the beauty that lay hidden inside. Of the traditional dome style, the old and weathered building loomed gray against the cloudy skies, and I remember thinking that it could use a little TLC, something to perk it up a bit. But the minute we walked through the doors, it was like being transformed into another world. The beauty of the architecture, the stained glass windows, the long barrel vault skylight, the murals depicting the history of Montana, and the intricate details found in every corner you looked made it hard to tear your eyes away from one spot to the next. I hope the pictures I have posted will speak for themselves. (Remember to click on the picture to enlarge it!)

I had always pronounced "Helena" as "HeLEEna" but as we soon found out, the correct pronunciation is actually "HELena", and when I looked this up on the web, I found an entertaining story of how this came about. Here is the clip from Wikipedia on the origin of the name, and how it is pronounced today.

"Helena was founded with the July 14, 1864 discovery of gold in a gulch off the Prickly Pear valley by the "Four Georgians", who were gold prospectors. The city's main street is named Last Chance Gulch and lies close to the winding path of the original gulch through the historic downtown district.

The original camp was named "Last Chance" by the Four Georgians. By fall, the population had grown to over 200 and the name "Last Chance" was viewed as too crass. On October 30, 1864, a group of at least seven men met to name the town, authorize the layout of the streets, and elect commissioners. The first suggestion was "Tomah," a word the committee thought had connections to the local Indian people of the area. Other nominations included Pumpkinville and Squashtown (as the meeting was held the day before Halloween). Other suggestions were to name the community after various Minnesota towns, such as Winona and Rochester. Finally, a Scotsman named John Summerville proposed "Helena," which he pronounced "hel-EE-na," "in honor of the heLEENa in Scott County, Minnesota..." This immediately caused an uproar from the former Confederates in the room who insisted upon the pronunciation HELena, after Helena, Arkansas, a town on the Mississippi River. While the name won, the pronunciation varied until approximately 1882 when the HELena pronunciation became dominant and has remained so to the present. Later tales of the naming of Helena claimed the name came variously from the Island of St. Helena, where Napoleon had been exiled, or was that of a miner's sweetheart."