Welcome to the Capitol (Collections Blog)!
Did you visit the Capitol for a tour in the 1970s? No doubt the building looked much different than it does today, but this smiling face likely greeted you. Marjorie Siebert was the first fulltime director of the Capitol Tour Service beginning in 1969 under the Department of Administration, leading a staff of mostly parttime college student guides. Prior to Siebert’s time, building custodians pulled double duty as tour guides. Shown in this photo, Marge Siebert is posing behind the tour desk in the first-floor east wing of the Capitol. The cased flags behind the desk are primarily from World War I. Those flag cases were removed during the Capitol Restoration (1987-1992), leaving the east corridor and its colonnade open as originally designed.
The Michigan State Capitol was pleased to recently acquire a small but mighty collection of material from the Siebert estate, relating to Marjorie Siebert and her son Philip Siebert, a noted Lansing area architectural historian.
Philip worked with the Honolulu House in Marshall in the 1960s as an advisor in historic preservation. In so doing, he captured a photograph of the Feige sideboard designed for the Governor’s parlor in the Capitol, which was held on loan at the Honolulu House for years before returning to the Capitol after its restoration. He also documented the historic Barnes Castle in Lansing as it was demolished in 1957 and was a member of the Friends of the Capitol, the first organization aimed a preserving the building.
Among the more unexpected finds in the collection were office files of John Gafner, onetime Superintendent of the Capitol, containing letters on the building portrait collection and photographs documenting the 1965 removal of original Civil War battle flags for conservation. One letter from Gov. Wilber Brucker reminds Capitol staff how to spell his name – with an ‘e’ not a ‘u’ – on a replacement gold plaque for his portrait.
A sampling of this collection is now available for viewing online at https://michiganstatecapitol.catalogaccess.com
-Jacob McCormick, Photo Archivist