More than 200 years after Samuel Adams and Paul Revere first buried it in Boston, it took an hour to remove all the objects crammed inside a tiny time capsule.
Onlookers anxiously watched the unveiling Tuesday, worrying the items might not have weathered the years very well.
“Could we actually go through the whole box, or would things prove too fragile to take out?” said Malcolm Rogers, director of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. “It was like brain surgery, with history looking down on us.”
Piece by piece, Pam Hatchfield, head of objects conservation for the museum, removed each item, whispering “wow” as she first caught a glimpse of some of them.
Among the stash Hatchfield removed from the 1795 time capsule: Five folded newspapers, a Massachusetts commonwealth seal, a title page from Massachusetts colony records and at least 24 coins.
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But don’t expect to see these objects showing up at any auction.
After the conservation process is finished, they’ll go on display at the museum. And eventually, the time capsule and its contents will be placed again in the cornerstone of the Massachusetts State House, said William F. Galvin, secretary of the commonwealth.
One question still remains, Galvin said: Will officials add anything new to the time capsule before they put it back?
“The governor has wisely suggested that we might,” he said, “so we’ll think about it.”
CNN’s Todd Leopold, Kevin Conlon, Anderson Cooper and Erin Burnett contributed to this report.
