“Though Richmond be already an old town and well situated for trade, being built on the spot where the James River begins to be navigable, that is, just below the rapids. It was before the war one of the least considerable in Virginia, where they are all in general very small, but the seat of the government being removed from Williamsburg it is become a real capital, and is augmenting every day.” [Illustration: BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF RICHMOND.] In 1782, Richmond was incorporated as a city, and three years later the foundations of the Capitol were laid. Especially beautiful in the summer months, when the grass is as green as emerald and the noble trees give grateful shade, is the Capitol Square. Squirrels play as if at home about the grounds, much to the delight of the children. The square, with its area of about twelve acres, includes the lot on which the Executive mansion stands, and is supposed to be a part of Nathaniel Bacon’s plantation, where his overseer was murdered by the Indians, whose punishment by him, without permission of the Governor, Sir William Berkeley, was the beginning of the famous Bacon’s rebellion. Of the Capitol itself, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “I was written to in 1785, being then in Paris, by Directors appointed to superintend the building of a Capitol in Richmond, to advise them as to a plan. * * * * * Thinking it a favorable opportunity of introducing into the State an example of the classic style of antiquity, and the Maison Quarrée of Nismes, an ancient Roman Temple, being considered as the most perfect model existing of what may be called Cubic architecture, I applied to M. Clerissault, who had published drawings of the antiquities at Nismes to have me a model of the building made in stucco, only changing the order from the Corinthian to Ionic on account of the difficulty of Corinthian Capitals.” The model sent by Jefferson is still preserved, and looks like a miniature of the Capitol with very slight variations. Jefferson says of it: “Here I am gazing whole hours at the Maison Quarrée like a lover at his mistress.” The corner-stone was laid in 1785, and on October 19, 1789, eight years to the day after the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, the Legislature convened in it. The Capitol is full of memories of bygone days. Here were debated and adopted the famous resolutions of 1798-99, drafted by James Madison as the true interpretation of the Federal compact. Here sat the convention of 1829-30, of which Marshall, Madison, Monroe and John Randolph of Roanoke were members, the convention of 1851, which enlarged the right of suffrage and, ten years later, the body which adopted the Act of Secession. Here, in 1862, met the congress of the Confederate States of America, which sat until April, 1865, when it adjourned--“Not _sine die_ indeed, yet never to meet again.”