Here we see the United States Capitol Building in Washington DC, shortly before completion of the second dome. The original dome had an outer layer of copper-plated wood, and was too small in relation to the size of the building after several expansions were added to the original structure. The current dome was begun in 1855, and we see it here on June 28th, 1863, nearly complete. In December 1863 it was finished, and the statue of Freedom was added to the top.

The photographer of this public domain image was Andrew Joseph Russell (1830-1902), an army Captain during the Civil War and an official photographer for the U.S. Army. He is best known for his images of the Civil War and his later work for the Union Pacific Railroad, including images of the meeting of the rails in Utah in 1869, which was also photographed by Charles R. Savage and A. A. Hart. Many of his views of the Union Pacific route from Cheyenne to Promontory Point (1868 and 1869) were published as stereo-views by Russell in the early 1870s. Then about 1875 O. C. Smith purchased the negatives, and published them under his own name (a common practice before photographic copyright was well defined) 1878 and later.