For the last several weeks, Shannon Dunfey Konvicka has been collecting, laminating and sorting through items that Warren community members want to use to memorialize what life is like in 2026. This week the letters, photographs, books, T-shirts and even a package of Twinkies will be sealed in a 30-gallon plastic barrel and buried in town on Saturday, September 12, with instructions that it not be opened until 2076.
“You’re not necessarily writing to yourselves; you’re writing to a stranger standing right where you are standing right now, and they’re wondering who you are,” said Konvicka, the Warren town historian. “There’s no other project where the entire audience, like, hasn’t been born yet.”
Konvicka was part of a small group that organized the new time capsule, timed for the country’s tricentennial, after Warren residents this summer dug up a capsule that had been buried 50 years ago, in 1976. That capsule, a Sugarbush gondola, contained a Jayne Mansfield water bottle, a Bob Dylan album, a rotary phone, beer bottle caps, birth control pills and a joint.
“We’re definitely putting in a joint,” Konvicka said with a laugh.
But the group has learned from past mistakes. The old capsule was completely waterlogged, destroying paper materials. So Konvicka is laminating letters, photos and newspaper clippings and putting them in plastic baggies. The Twinkies will go in a box; Konvicka wants to test the theory that the classic snack will not degrade over time.
She’s not sure she’ll still be around when the capsule is dug up. But Brian Wray, owner of Inklings Children’s Books, held a letter-writing campaign for kids, and many of the missives are of their “hopes and dreams,” Konvicka said. “Like, ‘I hope people are still nice.’” A children’s book, a program from a performance of Our Town and a retro Mad River Glen sweatshirt are all going into the barrel.
Konvicka acknowledged that the most moving items have been the letters.
“These people are trying to prove who they were,” she said. “It’s almost like you watch someone realize that they’re writing their own small obituary and deciding to make it a good one.”
The capsule will be buried at 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, September 12. Meet at the town pavilion. For more, visit warrenlibrary.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Frozen in Time”
This article appears in September 9 • 2026.
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