Watertown's City Hall celebrated its 50th anniversary Friday. The city commemorated the day by opening a time capsule sealed and hidden in the wall of the building since 1965.
Watertown Mayor Jeff Graham and former Mayors Tom Walker and Joseph Butler slowly opened a rectangular metal box in front of a crowd outside City Hall.
“Not sure what to expect here but we’ll grab a corner and pull it off," said Graham.
One by one, items placed in the box 50 years ago, were taken out -- a porcelain candy dish, a collection of coins from the
Kennedy half dollar to the Lincoln penny and the sheet detailing the pay of all city workers.
“Didn’t they have some Twinkies or something to put in there? A bar of gold to help the deficit?” said Anthony Bova, who admitted not being too impressed with the items in the time capsule. He was a high school student when City Hall was being built.
“I remember the old gas station that was sitting here at the time. Before the state office building was built there were a lot of nice homes in the area," Bova said.
His grandson Trey Jordan is excited. He holds up the yellowing front page of the Watertown Daily Times from June 26, 1965. The headline reads, “Reds Launch Major Offensive.” He says he'd been learning about the cold war in his seventh grade civics class.
"It was pretty cool because I was already interested in the Cold War and seeing what they wrote about it and all that was pretty cool,” Jordan said.
City employees started planning months ago what they would add to the time capsule today. City clerk Ann Saunders says not all suggestions made the cut.
“Well, there were a lot of ideas about writing letters to people in the future," says Saunders.
In the end, a Watertown Wolves hockey puck, and an “I love Fort Drum” button were added to the time capsule. Laminated documents detailing the price of a gallon of milk today and the median household income along with an aerial photo of the city captured by a drone were also slipped in. The contents will be sealed in the building’s wall until 2065.
