When the permanent seat of state government was moved from St. Charles to Jefferson City on October 1, 1826, it was headquartered in a building known as The Governor’s House. Not the capitol.

It was called the Governor’s House because it contained a couple of rooms for the lodging of the Governor and his office. The House of Representatives chamber was on the first floor. The Senate was on the second floor, an appropriate positioning for the body known at state and federal levels as “the upper house.’   Rooms for other state officers were in the building.

That was fine for Governor John Miller, a bachelor. But his successor, Daniel Dunklin, had a family, a situation that led to construction of an executive mansion nearby.

There were plans for a specific capitol but they didn’t come about until the Governor’s House burned in 1837 with a terrible loss of early records. The historical record is sketchy about what happened after the fire. How long did the gutted walls of the brick building remain? How was that area used between then and 1871 when the Governor’s Mansion was built?

Just where was the first seat of government on that lot?

Two conjectural drawings exist of that first building. One appears to show the building near the corner of Madison Street and Capitol Avenue. The other places the building closer to the bluff where it would be more visible to people traveling on the Missouri River.

We know it must have been fairly close because contemporary accounts say wet blankets were used to keep the mansion roof from catching fire from sparks blown from the burning original Governor’s House and a map from about 1843 indicates the 1826 building was near the present Executive Mansion site and the first Executive Mansion was built at the northwest corner of Madison Street at Capitol Avenue (which was Main Street then). We know from written records that the house was used during the Civil War by the officer in charge of the federal force that occupied the capital of Missouri.

How much of the current mansion, if any, is on or in the footprint of the first government building in the City of Jefferson?

There are some issues, often small ones, that get wrapped around a historian’s mind and won’t let go. Where were those buildings?

For several administrations this dabbler in archaeology (Nancy and I have spent several weeks in southwest Colorado mapping and finding pueblos either in the cliffs or on the ground of the Mancos River valley area near Mesa Verde) has wished somebody would be allowed to peel back the grass (in one way or another) at the Governor’s Mansion and in the process peel back the historical record to find the remains of the buildings that have occupied that space. Maybe there’s equipment that can survey the area without disturbing the lawn and pinpoint places to investigate without wiping out tent space. With the state’s first family in temporary quarters while major repairs and restorations are done at the old house, this might be a time to electronically see what’s under the yard.

The problem is that the lawn is often used for entertainment. Big tents are pitched and gatherings are held and digging up the lawn would disrupt those. But my goodness, what might we learn about the place where government began at its permanent location?

What’s under there?   Where was that first building in Jefferson City where some of Missouri’s greatest citizens of the first half of the Nineteenth Century walked, negotiated, and thundered?

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