Secrets of Lee statue time capsule finally revealed
RICHMOND, Va. — Now we know the mundane truth of what literally lay at the root of this city’s grandiose monument to Gen. Robert E. Lee: Confederate pride, local commerce and a whole lot of Masonic tradition.
That was the preliminary message of dozens of items recovered Tuesday from a copper time capsule that had been buried at the monument site in 1887. Chamber of Commerce yearbooks, Masonic bylaws, artifacts from the Civil War, a brochure from a local real estate office (complete with a telephone number: 114) all jampacked into a copper box that did a surprisingly good job of weathering 134 years.
The big payoff hinted at in news coverage of the time — a “picture of Lincoln lying in his coffin” — turned out not to be an ultrarare photograph. Instead, an engraved double-page spread from Harper’s Weekly of 1865 depicting a woman mourning at Lincoln’s casket had been folded up and entombed beneath the Confederacy’s beloved Lee.
That didn’t seem to dampen public interest in Tuesday’s event, which was livestreamed and drew media coverage from around the world. The time capsule marks an intriguing epilogue to the tale of the Lee statue, which was transformed last year by protesters and graffiti into an internationally recognized icon of the racial equity movement.
Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, ordered the statue removed in September. Workers searched for the time capsule then but didn’t find it. Another time capsule surfaced earlier this month as the statue’s 40-foot stone pedestal was being dismantled. That turned out to be a vanity project placed by several men who designed parts of the monument. Each attempt to find the official capsule seemed to increase public interest — almost as if its contents would somehow solve the public debate about how to reckon with racial history. Whatever the reason, state historic resources director Julie Langan said widespread fascination with the history of the time capsule was “the most moving part for me.”
Conservators carefully unpacked the box Tuesday in front of a swarm of media cameras. Though many of the items were wet and stuck together, they were mostly intact.
“We thought everything would be soup, and it’s not soup, so that’s great,” said Kate Ridgway, archaeological conservator for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Work crews digging up the foundation of the pedestal discovered the box Monday, sitting in a pool of water in a recess cut into granite.
Ridgway speculated that the copper material of the box had acted as a fungicide and biocide to kill microorganisms that might otherwise have eaten the paper items within. Ridgway came in Tuesday to prepare the 36-pound box for its public reveal. She cut three edges of the lid and peered in. At 1 p.m., with a host of state officials on hand, Ridgway peeled away the plastic bag and, using a Dremel rotary tool, cut open the fourth edge of the lid. She lifted it off, removed the blotter and exposed the contents to open air. On top — a Minié ball, or Civil War bullet, and a button that appeared to bear a Virginia seal.