US State Capitals

All fifty state capitals

State capitals are a list people know from school and almost nobody has finished, partly because so few of them are the cities you'd visit otherwise. New York's capital is Albany, not New York; California's is Sacramento; Illinois keeps its government in Springfield, three hours from Chicago. Only a handful — Boston, Denver, Atlanta, Nashville, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Honolulu — double as major destinations. The rest you have to go to on purpose, which is exactly what makes the list a good excuse for seeing the country.

Most capitals are worth the detour for the capitol building alone. Several are genuinely spectacular: the Texas capitol in Austin is taller than the U.S. Capitol, Nebraska's in Lincoln is a 400-foot Art Deco tower, and West Virginia's gold dome in Charleston and Iowa's in Des Moines are postcards. Tours are usually free, and the capitol is almost always the best-preserved building in town.

The far-flung ones

Juneau, Alaska, is the capital you can't drive to — it's reached by air or ferry only, hemmed in by mountains and the Gastineau Channel. Honolulu is the only one outside the continental U.S. Montpelier, Vermont, is the smallest, with fewer than 8,000 people and no McDonald's, and Pierre, South Dakota, is the only capital without an interstate. Carson City, Helena, and Cheyenne are small western towns that happen to have a dome. Click a capital badge or its pin to mark it visited, again for want-to-go. Washington, D.C., a national capital rather than a state one, is on the world capitals map.

Capitals that moved

Many capitals ended up where they are through compromise or accident. Several states chose a central, neutral town over a big city precisely to keep the legislature away from the merchants — which is why Albany and not New York, Springfield and not Chicago, Jefferson City and not St. Louis. California's capital moved five times before settling in Sacramento in 1854. Louisiana's moved to Baton Rouge, back to New Orleans, and back again. Oklahoma's shifted from Guthrie to Oklahoma City in 1910 in a midnight raid that spirited the state seal out of town. Every capitol has a version of that story, and the tour guides tell it well.