It was July 4, 1976. Gerald Ford was president, gas was 60 cents per gallon, and a new house in Vermont cost a whopping $46,000.
As Americans across the country celebrated the nation’s bicentennial, a group of twentysomethings from Warren artist enclave Prickly Mountain unveiled their annual Fourth of July parade float: a giant eagle with a nest. Inside the nest was an “egg,” a decommissioned gondola from nearby Sugarbush Resort, which the group had turned into a time capsule. Days later, Pierre Moffroid buried it with a backhoe near the Pitcher Inn.
Nearly 50 years later on a humid Tuesday morning, a smattering of those same Warren residents, most of them now in their seventies, gathered at the same spot under a mature apple tree to watch as the town road crew unearthed a piece of local history. Joining them were a few dozen local residents, some schoolchildren and members of the press.
“Nobody has a full inventory of what went in,” said Shannon Dunfey Konvicka, Warren’s town historian. “Could be mud. Could be Grateful Dead tickets, love letters, diamonds.”
Alex Maclay, 74, whose husband, Bill, was one of the Prickly Mountain architects and artists who built the float, remembers tossing her garter belt inside.
“I put my birth control pills in there. And a Sears credit card,” said Candy Barr, whose late husband, Dave Sellers, came up with the idea for the time capsule.
Mary Moffroid, Pierre’s wife, remembers him stashing a $1 million check inside from his now-defunct insulation company, Many Clouds.
“Everyone was hoping to get here and cash it,” she said. But even if it survived, the financial institution it was written on, Howard Bank, no longer exists.
At 9:30 a.m., the road crew unceremoniously broke ground with a backhoe as everyone looked on. Someone wondered aloud if the reveal would turn into Geraldo Rivera’s infamous 1986 live television special, “The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault,” which, once opened, proved empty except for a few moonshine bottles. Chris Kathan, who’s worked for the town for 25 years and was helping dig the hole, accidentally hit the gondola a few years ago with a backhoe while installing a power conduit. At the time, he recalled, the gondola was mostly full of water.
Indeed, at 9:42 a.m., the backhoe struck water, and many people speculated what could have survived — until a few items were pulled from the mud. The first was a small, beige plastic case with rows of holes in it. It was Barr’s birth control pills.
While Barr explained the contraceptive device to 11-year-old Sylvia Lehmhoff of Fayston — “Diaphragms don’t work. IUDs are probably your best bet,” she informed the girl — several more items emerged, including a Jane Mansfield hot water bottle. Jim Sanford, 79, gave it to his friend Richard “Trav” Travers, who’d buried the bottle with items packed inside. Once opened, it contained a sparkler, some Genesee beer bottle caps — “We used to buy six-packs of Genny’s for 99 cents,” Travers remembered — a King Kong postcard, a film canister and a joint. Another partially obscured postcard read, “We hope you do as well in 2026 as we did in 1976. Good luck.”
At 10:53, when the backhoe still couldn’t pull the gondola from the mud, the decision was made to tear off its fiberglass roof. The crowd cheered as one of the workers pulled more items from inside the dismembered gondola including ski boot liners, a decorative plate, a pink Frisbee, a five-day deodorant, an ice scraper, a red rotary phone and a pair of Sugarbush season passes.
Alas, the million-dollar check did not seem to have survived, nor the Warren phone book, which half a century underground had turned into a pulpy mess. Sanford was disappointed that his sealed jar with written memories inside had been breached, leaving nothing to read. But Connie Colman was thrilled when a black vinyl disc was tossed from the hole onto the grass. (Smithsonian archaeological standards these were not.)
“My Bob Dylan album!” she exclaimed.
When Colman was asked what she would advise the children of Warren to put inside the next time capsule, which will be buried in September and opened in 2076, she offered this advice: “Put something in that represents your passion. Or your humor.”
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
