SEARSPORT, Maine — One hundred years ago, the people of this Penobscot Bay town packed a copper time capsule with memorabilia of their lives and laid it safely into the cornerstone of the brand-new Carver Memorial Library.
For a century the box awaited rediscovery by another generation of book lovers, but as the library staff and volunteers made plans to open it in a centennial ceremony on Sunday, Oct. 3, they realized there was a problem.
“There is a little mystery about where the copper box actually is,” Marge Knuuti, president of the library’s board of trustees, said Saturday.
The cornerstone of the library is massive and impossible to remove, she said, so residents broadened their search. They used a metal detector and even a cemetery probe to try to find the box, and last week, people grabbed shovels and dug a 4-foot-deep trench near the cornerstone.
“They thought they had hit pay dirt,” Knuuti said of the all-out effort.
Nothing.
So they borrowed a backhoe, digging until they hit the sewer line. When they found no copper box, some gave up, Knuuti said, and assumed that the box had been destroyed over the years.
“We were disappointed,” Knuuti said.
But not all were convinced.
“I didn’t believe it,” said library director Chase Colasante. “I thought we shouldn’t give up.”
So Knuuti began another quest to locate that box. With the help of her son, a civil engineer, and her daughter, a geologist, she looked into something called “penetrating radar.” She contacted the Maine State Geologists organization and began e-mailing University of Maine professors.
“She launched on this exciting worldwide search,” Colasante said this week. “It was very cool.”
When Knuuti’s engineer son — who grew up with the library — said that not all of the outside stones were structural, inspiration struck.
“Chase said, ‘If it’s not structural, why don’t we just call a mason?’” Knuuti recalled.
On Sunday, mason John Krueger removed a stone above the cornerstone and there, at last, was the missing copper box.
“We found it!” an excited Knuuti wrote that Sunday in an e-mail to the Bangor Daily News.
While the box had water damage and its contents are “sort of a blob,” she wrote, its discovery is still a great opportunity for the community to participate in creating another time capsule.
Mark Riposta of Crabiel-Riposta Funeral Home in Belfast has donated a large urn that will be filled with items contributed by the public and will be buried later this year.
The new time capsule will provide a snapshot of a community library that has served the people of Searsport for a century. The library was constructed in 1910 by the family of Capt. George Carver and dedicated to his memory.
The granite-and-brick building features a domed ceiling, intricate wooden carvings and fireplaces and was built for $25,000. A 1999 expansion nearly doubled the size of the original structure.
“What’s on our minds now is the idea of a true community-run library,” Colasante said. “The library was a gift to the town. Today we’re still a small-town library, but yet a full-service library. The engine continues to be the community — people are personally invested in it.”
The Carver Memorial Library centennial will be celebrated at noon Sunday, Oct. 3, on the library lawn. For information, call 548-2303.