Our columnist, Sebastian Modak, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2019 list. He arrived in Cheyenne, Wyo., from Las Vegas, where he explored an unexpected side of the city, and then moved on to Huntsville, Ala.

When the planners restoring the Wyoming State Capitol building in Cheyenne unearthed a set of old blueprints for the building, they realized that, at some point in the past, history had fallen prey to bureaucracy. A cluster of fluorescent-lit offices and a copy room on the building’s second floor, it turns out, had been home to the Wyoming territorial assembly and later the Supreme Court. Where people now battle paper jams, a constitution had been drafted and statehood ratified.

When I visited the Capitol on my sixth stop of 52, teams of painters were recreating the original trompe l’oeil wallpaper, others were restoring the wooden banisters of the viewing deck and, in general, bringing the entire section of the building back to its single-room , former glory in time for July 10 when Wyoming will celebrate 129 years of statehood. 2019 also marks 150 years since the territory of Wyoming guaranteed women the right to vote and hold office — 51 years before the country guaranteed women voting rights with the 19th Amendment . On the eve of statehood, from that very room, Wyoming officials sent a rebuttal to the United States Congress, which was reluctant to welcome a state where women could vote. The telegram reportedly said something along the lines of: “We will remain out of the Union 100 years rather than come in without the women.”

More than 1,000 miles away, another momentous paint job was underway in Huntsville, Ala. When I saw it, the 363-foot-tall vertical replica of the Saturn V rocket that towers over the city was about a quarter of the way through its face lift, the line between bright white and weathered yellow marking the progress. It, too, is set to be finished this summer, just in time to commemorate 50 years since the Saturn V rocket built in Huntsville launched Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon on July 16, 1969.