Bicentennial Time Capsule for Deerfield 200 in New York
The Deerfield NY Bicentennial in 1998 featured a community time capsule project headed up by Dick Kowalczyk.
For the contents you see in the photo here, we removed the vinyl binders and put the contents into an acid free envelope. The baseball cap was wrapped in acid free tissue.
All other contents were enclosed in acid free materials. Today you can buy the same fine supplies in handy preservation kits. If you wonder about why you might want to preserve items while they're inside of the time capsule, see more articles about preservation.
The next two photos show the signed capsule once it was placed, and the time capsule committee lowering the time capsule into the enclosure.
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The time capsule committee for the Deerfield New York Bicentennial made this above ground enclosure for the time capsule.
If you do this for your own time capsule, be sure to add as much insulation in between the outside of the time capsule & inside of your enclosure as you can.
Insulation helps minimize the harsh effects of temperature changes over time. See our blog post on why insulation is important.
One good thing about burying time capsules is that at least the contents stay at an even temperature. Changes in temperature day to night, over and over again, bode ill for time capsule contents.Of course, if you bury a time capsule, you need to be concerned about moisture seeping in and leakage, unless you use one of our time capsules.
Deerfield had good participation from their community, and they had a good turnout for their time capsule dedication event. See how Deerfield had fun with their project.
Folks signed the time capsule all over with a permanent marking pen! While the pen markings may not last all that long, they might - and the pen markings will do no harm to the stainless steel.