A crowd gathered in the rain Thursday morning to break ground on the $122 million Georgia Judicial Complex near the State Capitol.

Only when Gov. Nathan Deal spoke about one of his favorite subjects—the history of the appellate courts in Georgia—did the clouds part for a few minutes.

“I'm not sure what that means,” said Steve Stancil, executive director of the Georgia Building Authority, who is managing the project. “But I learned a lot. I didn't know that for the first 68 years of our existence, we didn't have a Supreme Court.”