STATE CAPITOL "SECRET" TUNNEL
Raleigh, North Carolina
In the first-floor hallways of the Capitol there are granite paving stones. One stone in each hall originally had two large iron rings (some have been removed through the years). The stone with rings that is located directly in front of the governor's office, in the south hallway, is the subject of a post-Civil War era legend. Some people have said that the paver was the entrance to a secret escape tunnel, which the chief executive could use to quickly flee from the Capitol to the Governor's residence. This could not be further from the truth.
Until the 1880's the Governor's Palace was located at the southern end of Fayetteville Street (on the present site of Memorial Auditorium). Construction of the subterranean tunnel nearly six blocks in length would not have been a secret, considering the amount of earth that would have had to have been moved. If such a tunnel had been constructed as an "escape tunnel", it would not have been of much use to Governor Zebulon Vance near the end of the Civil War. He probably would have been captured by the advancing troops of General William T. Sherman, whose massive Union Army was rapidly approaching the city of Raleigh from the south.
Actually, the pavers in the Capitol floors do have a purpose - but not for escape from the building. They were installed in the 1830's in order for future workmen to gain access to crawl space beneath the Capitol for the repair of wooden office floor joists and doorsills. The first tunnel that connected the Capitol to another building was a small steam tunnel that was completed in the late 1880's. The tunnel ran to a steam plant, one-half block north of the Capitol, which provided heat for the building. It was later used to carry cables. Likely, the story of the "secret tunnel" was the product of a local citizen imagination to explain the existence of the ringed stones, and the story was repeated so frequently that after a few year it became "fact".