Fifty years later, West Unity’s time capsule is missing

A stone and a bronze plaque are all that’s left at Memorial Park. The box was supposed to come up this year.

By Forrest R. Church

The stone is still there at Memorial Park in West Unity. So is the bronze plaque on it, the one that reads “Time Capsule 1976.”

The capsule is not. It was supposed to come up this year.

“We just don’t know where to dig anymore,” Mayor Don Leu wrote to me on Oct. 23. By then, village crews had already moved the boulder, more than 5,000 pounds of it, and broken apart the concrete beneath it.

“We dug it up a week ago and there was a block of concrete under it, but nothing was in the concrete and nothing was underneath the concrete and nothing’s around the concrete,” he wrote. “Everybody around says that’s the place.”

I will admit, I figured this one would be easy. All he wanted to know was whether our old papers had a picture of the box going into the ground. Our newspaper line reaches back to the 1870s through the West Unity Reporter and the other papers that merged over the years to become The Village Reporter. Surely somebody had taken that picture.

So far, nobody has found it, and the old newspapers only add to the mystery. Here is what we do know. Someone reading this may hold the missing piece.

What 1976 left behind

The capsule was part of West Unity’s weeklong Bicentennial celebration in June 1976, put on by the West Unity Area Bicentennial Committee: Ken Vandeveer, chairman; Marilyn Royal, secretary; Betty Ricks, treasurer; Bill Stine, Janet Poletta, Linda Ricks, Norma Vandeveer, Mary Suter, Mike and Kathy Rickenburg, and Mike Friery.

Staff at the Williams County Public Library’s Local History & Genealogy Center found the committee’s plan in the June 7, 1976, Leader Enterprise. The capsule would be buried at the park on Sunday, June 20, after a community worship service called “One Nation Under God,” and placed “directly in front of the stone.” The box measured 12 inches square and 10 inches deep. It was to be reopened in 50 years.

The committee hoped “the entire village, and area, will become interested so that only the very best artifacts may be included in it.” Items were due June 19. Anyone sending snapshots was reminded “they should be black and white as they last longer.”

The center’s staff pointed us in the right direction with microfilm. From there, Casey Church, co-owner of The Village Reporter, found our own archives of The Advance Reporter. The earliest mention we found of a capsule is in its March 9, 1976, edition. The committee had met Feb. 19 and “discussed a Time Capsule,” thinking of “preserving the valuables they collect by placing them in a vault.”

The boulder came from Lyman Ricks of Route 1, Alvordton. The box came from Bill Hollingshead, a longtime West Unity funeral director. The Advance Reporter reported on May 4, 1976, that “a concrete box has been donated” through “the efforts of Bill Hollingshead and his supplier.” Hang onto that detail.

The center’s staff also found a photo of the stone. It ran on The Advance Reporter’s front page on June 22, 1976, two days after the service. Five people stand beside the boulder: Betty Ricks, Mrs. Lyman Ricks, Linda Ricks, and Mr. and Mrs. Ernie Ricks. The caption calls it “the commemorative stone marking the burial site of West Unity’s Time Capsule.” It puts the boulder at “over 5,000 lbs.” The Advance Reporter ran that same photo again in its “30 Years Ago” column in June 2006.

The June 22 page reported that the Sunday service went on as planned, with the Hilltop Band playing and the West Unity Minutemen and American Legion raising the flag. What it doesn’t describe, and what no one has found since, is the box going into the ground.

There was a second capsule that spring, and that one is accounted for. Hilltop High School’s American history class buried its own on the school lawn on May 28, in front of a large crowd. The Advance Reporter’s June 8, 1976, front page ran a photo and a list of what went inside. It was a plastic pipe set in cement. I had a foggy memory that it came out when the new school was built, and sure enough, The Advance Reporter’s Aug. 19, 2009, front page shows school officials lifting it from in front of the old flagpole. It was marked “AM HIST 1976-2076” and moved to the new building, to be opened in 2076. Students were set to move into the new school in January 2010. No photo like the June 8 one has turned up for the park.

Fifty years, one box: a timeline

Two digs

The village dug first on Oct. 15. Crews moved the boulder and found it sitting on a block of concrete that Leu put at 4 feet by 4 feet by 4 feet.

“Our jackhammer would not hardly even chip it,” he wrote. Jason Hancock brought in his skid steer and jackhammer and broke it apart. There was nothing inside.

“We thought maybe they were playing games and buried it inside that chunk of concrete,” Leu wrote on Nov. 4. “But it wasn’t in it. They probably poured it just to put the rock on it so it wouldn’t sink over the years.”

Leu then talked with Marilyn Royal, the committee’s secretary in 1976. She remembered “about the same as the paper did,” he wrote. He said she, Butch Headley and Bill Beers all recalled the capsule going “a few feet in front of the rock.” An April 1976 paper lists Beers as co-chairman with Ken Vandeveer, and Leu confirmed it is him.

On Oct. 29, the crew went back.

“Today we dug from the location of the rock out around 10 feet and down 3 feet in the entire area,” Leu wrote that night. “Then they prodded it another 3 feet and nothing was found.”

Now, remember Bill Hollingshead, the funeral director. Before the 1976 clipping turned up, the crew believed the capsule was in a baby casket.

“We thought it was in a baby casket, which would’ve been a lot bigger than 12 x 12,” Leu wrote. “So we could’ve just missed it when we were prodding the ground.”

He has since heard it called both a baby coffin and a baby’s vault.

The 1976 papers say a 12-inch concrete box was donated. The man behind that box was a funeral director, which is why the casket story is not as farfetched as it sounds. The Hollingshead family may be the only ones who can settle it.

So what happened to it?

The community has already started asking.

Was it ever buried?
The plan says it would be, and that week’s caption called the stone the “burial site.” But no account of the burial itself has turned up, even after staff at The Village Reporter researched all of 1976.

Did it break down?
Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, dug up its 1976 capsule this June and found that water had leaked in and ruined most of what was inside. A May 4, 1976, item in The Advance Reporter says a concrete box was donated for the capsule, but no one can say what 50 years in the ground did to it.

Is it deeper?
Knox, Pennsylvania, came up empty on its first try this summer, then found its capsule in August, deeper than expected, under fill dirt.

Was the stone moved?
If the boulder was ever lifted or shifted in 50 years, “directly in front of the stone” may not point to the same spot. No one has said it was.

Was it disturbed?
Memorial Park was being reworked that spring. A village history in The Advance Reporter’s Jan. 27, 1976, edition said the park would “undergo a watershed sewage project in 1976.” On April 28, ground was broken on a drainage project meant to open 16 more acres of the park for recreation. On May 6, Village Council approved a request from the park board to extend a power line into the park, underground if possible. Whether any of that work touched the ground in front of the stone is not known. Leu wrote that the electrical line out that way “does not come near the rock.” A waterline ran from the road to the cannon, which is “4 to 5 feet behind the rock.” “We have nothing else in that area of the rock.” Sewer construction across the village, a separate project, was set to begin Oct. 18.

Was it taken?
Leu raised that himself after the second dig. “We’re beginning to think maybe somebody dug it up a long time ago and took it or decided to move it somewhere and never told anybody,” he wrote. A few days later he added, “No one knows of anybody ever digging it up and removing it to somewhere else. As far as we know, it still should be there.”

West Unity has company

Paul Hudson, a founder of the International Time Capsule Society, has long estimated that about 80 percent of time capsules end up lost.

Closer to home, Montpelier lifted its 1976 capsule on July 18 and buried a new one at Town Hall on Aug. 1, as reported in The Village Reporter on Aug. 5. Fort Recovery found its own in Krenning Park in July after hours of searching, tucked inside a milk can. The Ohio State Fair’s 1976 capsule has never been found.

At West Grove Elementary in Indiana, a 1976 school capsule couldn’t be found in 2000 after the trees marking the spot died and the lawn was resodded. In 2017, a utility-locating technician scanned the ground with radar. Five hours later, a school trustee dug nearly 4 feet down and hit an old green trash bucket.

So it happens. Sometimes it just takes longer.

The village has not yet tried radar. Leu wrote that he has Brian Wieland looking into it. “So if I can come up with it, we may try that.”

Still on

Leu has said what would end the guessing: a photo of that box going into the ground. Until someone finds “a picture of them burying it,” he wrote, the village is “probably not going to find it.”

That picture could be sitting in a shoebox in somebody’s closet right now. So could a list of what went inside, a committee member’s notes, or one clear memory of that Sunday in June 1976.

Fifty years ago, the committee asked for black-and-white snapshots because they last longer. One of them may be the key.

Until then, the stone still sits at Memorial Park, its plaque still reading “Time Capsule 1976,” keeping a promise no one can find.

“So the search is still on,” Leu wrote. ■

Can you help?

Were you at the park on Sunday, June 20, 1976?

Do you have a photograph of the time capsule being buried, a list of what went inside it, or a memory of what the box looked like?

Contact The Village Reporter at publisher@thevillagereporter.com or (419) 485-4851.