Frederic Hall described the building as sixty feet long and forty wide, with the Assembly upstairs and the Senate chamber below. The town first agreed to rent it, then decided to buy it, and nineteen citizens signed a note for the price; the Legislature later voted bonds to pay for it. It burned on April 29, 1853.
Lawmakers grumbled about the town’s lodgings from the first week, and in 1851 the capital moved to land offered by Mariano Vallejo at what is now Benicia.