The State Archives Exhibit room provides a visual representation that the offices of the State Archives, now located one block south of the Capitol, were once housed in the Capitol. Unlike other “house museum” rooms that museum staff have furnished and staged to look exactly like historic offices, these rooms remain unfurnished. The architecture of the rooms, however, has been recreated in exacting detail.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the Archives Exhibit Room is the ceiling. Recreated from a pattern found on a small remnant of the original ceiling, today, the poppy design parget ceiling and decorative frieze rests in its former glory. Multi-colored parget plasterwork was common in the construction of the Capitol,
but was something of a lost art for restoration workers in the 1970s. Artists used pastry tubes and other tools to apply plaster directly on the wall and ceiling where artists sculpted it into the final forms and painted.