Capitol mystery: Who took Cass Gilbert's chairs (and other stuff)?

When architect Cass Gilbert drew up his plans for the state Capitol, he also designed much of the furniture he wanted inside it, including ornate benches, desks, tables and light fixtures.

But that was more than 100 years ago, and things tend to get misplaced.

Now, as the $309 million restoration of the building moves toward a scheduled 2017 completion, state officials are trying to round up some of the missing items or find companies that can recreate them. Gilbert designed many of the nearly 1,600 original pieces. The fate of about half of the original furniture remains a mystery.

The list includes original ornate elevator doors, several easy chairs and four roll-top desks that Gilbert designed for the governor's suite of offices, said Brian Pease, the Minnesota Historical Society's site manager at the Capitol. The historical society would love to find and return the missing desks, which Pease described as significant pieces.

"Those have disappeared from the building," he said. "We don't have any idea where they went."

When the Capitol opened in 1905, and for decades after that, people didn't necessarily think of the furniture as a historic or essential part of the building.

Over time, many pieces were sold, discarded or moved when government offices relocated to other buildings, Pease said. For instance an original table has been across the street in the Secretary of State's office for many decades, he said. When historians began an annual inventory of furniture in the 1980s, they found pieces in several state government buildings, and that's where they've remained, Pease added.

"That's something that we've allowed to happen, just because there isn't any place to use those pieces of furniture -- until the restoration project began," he said. "That opens another door for an opportunity to bring as much of the historic furniture, the original Cass Gilbert furniture, back into the building."

Wayne Waslaski, senior director of real estate and construction services for the Minnesota Department of Administration, said the furniture budget is $4.5 million and is key part of the Capitol renovation project. Waslaski said some missing pieces of original furniture will be reproduced and others will be restored.

"There's about, on the existing inventory, somewhere between 300 and 400 pieces we're looking at for refurbishing," he said. "A lot of that we're going to make that evaluation when we get proposals back and make a determination on how much any particular item gets refurbished."

Waslaski said the goal is to round up as much of the original furnishings as possible and return them to the Capitol.

Other history buffs want to track down missing state Capitol furniture too, but only for story-telling purposes.

Carolyn Kompelien, who previously served as Capitol site manager, is organizing a furniture project for the Cass Gilbert Society. Kompelien said the plan is to locate and then document the pieces with a series of stories that will be published online.

"Our purpose is to do work for the long range preservation of the Capitol, to collect stories. We don't want furnishings. We don't want furniture. We want the stories about them."

There is some original Capitol furniture that's definitely gone forever. The 134 House chamber chairs were replaced and sold to legislators back in the 1970s. There's no plan to try to get them back. Instead, the House chairs will be replaced for a second time with historic reproductions. The Senate will continue using refurbished, original chairs.