On Monday, August 28, the United States Military Academy West Point campus hosted a much-anticipated unboxing occasion for a roughly 194-year-old time capsule that was found in the bottom of a monument earlier this 12 months. The reveal was live-streamed on YouTube and attended by school members, cadets, and alumni from the academy in addition to archaeologists, army historians, and staffers on the West Point Museum, all gathered in anticipation of uncovering historic artifacts.
So, what was contained in the field? Well, not a lot past some shards of dried-up silt.
The meager findings doubtless disillusioned the cadets who, in line with Academy Dean Shane Reeves, had speculated that the time capsule contained alum and former President Ulysses S. Grant’s beard trimmers, maps of the campus steam tunnels, and one way or the other, a thumb drive with misplaced Bitcoins on it.
Before the field was pried open, West Point Dean Shane Reeves marveled on the time capsule that was left untouched for 194 years. Still, he admitted that the field might very doubtless include “nothing,” throwing in a reference to the 1986 televised broadcast of journalist Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone’s hidden vault in Chicago, which revealed solely a cease signal and a few empty bottles inside.
The leaden container in query was recovered in May of this 12 months from the bottom of a campus monument honoring Polish General Tadeusz Kościuszko, who helped to strengthen West Point’s authentic army fort in the course of the American Revolutionary War earlier than the academy was based in 1802.
Designed by West Point graduate John H. B. Latrobe and unveiled in 1828, the monument started present process restoration efforts in 2021 after structural cracks have been found alongside the unique column and base. The bronze statue of Kosciuszko was solely put in atop the columnar monument in 1913, and had already been saved away when development supervisor Chris Branson unearthed the one-cubic-foot field from the marble base. West Point’s Department of Physics and Nuclear Engineering had taken X-rays of the field, however the outcomes have been inconclusive.
West Point officers dated the container, now deemed a time capsule, to the year 1828, however the Associated Press notes that the monument might not have been accomplished till 1829 based mostly on written correspondence from West Point then-cadet Robert E. Lee, who later grew to become the commander of the Confederate States Army in the course of the Civil War. Ironically sufficient, a 130-year-old time capsule was recovered from the base of a Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond, Virginia, in 2021 after the namesake statue was eliminated in mild of the riots sparked by the homicide of George Floyd. Rather than dried silt, that capsule as a substitute yielded some moist books and a coin.
“While the matter inside the box is inconclusive at this point, opening the box has given us further leads to research the history and meaning of this Revolutionary hero and his monument that stood looking over the Academy and the Hudson River for 194 years,” US Military Academy Command Historian Jennifer Voigtschild wrote in a press release to Hyperallergic. “With the approaching 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and the nation, the US Military Academy is looking forward to future opportunities to research, mark the spots, reflect, and be inspired by our early history and its legacy.”
West Point intends to rekindle the custom with a brand new time capsule for the marble base as soon as the monument is absolutely restored. Maybe that one cadet’s Bitcoin concept wasn’t so dangerous in any case.
