50-year-old time capsule unearthed in downtown Jacksonville
Story and Photos By Kyla Hurt
With the culmination of the bicentennial celebration for the City of Jacksonville scheduled for Saturday, October 4, a number of details are being finalized — including the reveal of the contents within the city’s time capsule that was buried close to its corresponding above-ground marker on the square in downtown during the 1975 sesquicentennial.
The hiccup? The originally-placed marker had to be picked up, stored and finally reset when the square was redone in 2011, according to Jacksonville Main Street Executive Director Judy Tighe. This meant that the marker may not have been reset in the exact spot, possibly farther from the time capsule. Thus, sonar was used on Wednesday, March 19 to discover the exact location of the city’s time capsule; it took four hours to find the location close to a magnolia tree on the northeast corner of the current square.
The weekend passed and a few City of Jacksonville employees met up again the morning of Monday, March 24 to try to uncover the time capsule with the use of an excavator. It was not a public event due to safety concerns and the fact that the handful of bicentennial committee members and representatives present were unsure as to in what condition the capsule — and especially its contents — might be found.
So, the digging began.
The excavator scooped out chunks of earth until the time capsule was reached. At that point, John Green, maintenance superintendent for the City of Jacksonville, jumped down into the hole and began shoveling by hand, locating the edges.
The time capsule was technically a burial vault, its exterior painted blue with white stars on the top and alternating stripes of red and white around its sides. Once uncovered, most the exterior paint had worn or chipped away, leaving only a few spots on the top of the vault where one could still make out a star shape. The top of the vault was lifted off slowly by the excavator, creating long strings of a dark brownish-orange, viscous material (assumedly the original sealant) as the top pulled from the receptacle.
The few faces surrounding the excavation site cheered as the contents were partially revealed, proving no water damage and very limited molding. The top layer in the historic cache of goods and information exposed a myriad of items.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of layers of treasures,” Green shared.
Members of the City of Jacksonville Bicentennial Committee worked to take a quick, written inventory of items as each was pulled from the vault and placed in storage tubs for later detailed inventory. The time capsule’s inventory held so much: Crimsons athletic gear, period clothing with accompanying hand-written descriptions, parking meters, portions of trolley ties and iron rails from as early as circa 1878, a pair of white Converse, school yearbooks, a Montgomery Ward catalog, knitted wear, license plates, old newspaper from the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, a letter from the sesquicentennial committee addressed to the bicentennial committee, a hardhat bearing a label of “Honorable Milt. Hocking, Mayor,” a video tape of city employees in the municipal building from 1975, Jacksonville’s ‘town square urban renewal’ final project report dated 1969, a menu from The Beef and The Bird Restaurant, envelopes from area service groups — all just to start.
Of note, several items were also wrapped in foil, presumably as a protective measure of some sort.
The time capsule also contained a large number of manila envelopes placed within zipped plastic bags, each envelope addressed to the descendants of families at that time and finished with a gold-embossed sticker that reads, “City of Jacksonville — 1825 Sesquicentennial 1975.”
The plan is to have items from the time capsule available for viewing at the City of Jacksonville’s Bicentennial Finale on October 4, 2025 in historic downtown Jacksonville. Mark your calendars!
For additional information on the bicentennial, visit the “Jacksonville, IL Bicentennial” page on the Jacksonville Area Convention & Visitors Bureau’s website, jacksonvilleil.org.
