When I was married to my first wife, she told me a story about what happened when her grandmother died. Once this 90-something woman died, the “children” all went over to her old house “on the hill” and started probate on the belongings. And there they discovered that there was a very large, and very heavy bureau that had been against the one wall for as long as anyone could remember. And when they emptied the bureau, and moved the heavy massive piece away, they discovered a locked door.
When they opened it, they found a child’s bedroom dating from the 1920’s all perfectly preserved.
Apparently, my wife’s oldest uncle told the story that when he was five years old, he and his older brother, who was six went out playing on the frozen river, and the older brother fell into the ice and died. Since he was so young at the time, he had forgotten about the older brother and the event, but the grandmother simply walled up the room. Closed the blinds, shut the drapes and never spoke of the lost son ever again.
Inside was the room just as the boy had left it. With clothing on the floor, an unmade bed. Toys about, and other things of that period such as books, cast metal toys, an an old baseball mitt and bat.
It’s a fascinating story, and one that comes up time and time again over the years.
- Time capsules are purposely built to contain interesting and unique items meant to be uncovered at a predetermined date in the future. This can often be a century or more after the capsule is buried.
- Unintentional time capsules are something else altogether as they are far rarer and only appear when least expected. These are places and items lost for a time. But when they are revealed, they showcase what life was like in the past.
Here we can look at some other time capsules as we explore this interesting subject.
Lost Purse From 1957 Discovered In 2019
In 1957, a young woman named Patti Rumfola was attending Hoover High School in Ohio when something terrible happened: She lost her purse. That stroke of bad luck for Rumfola turned into an incredible discovery in 2019 when her handbag was finally found by a custodian.
Unfortunately, it was a bit too late for Rumfola as she had passed away in 2013 at age 71. Still, the purse was found, and with some Internet sleuthing, the original owner was identified. The handbag was given to one of her daughters, who had the opportunity to peek into her mother’s life from 62 years in the past.[1]
The purse, which had fallen behind some lockers, ultimately became an unintentional time capsule filled with the kinds of items you might expect to find in a young girl’s handbag in 1957. There were several pristine tickets to her school’s football games, a couple of library cards, a photograph of one of her friends, a wallet, and a small amount of change. Each of her five children kept a penny from the purse to remember their mother.
The Town Of Bodie, California
Shortly before the US Civil War broke out, gold was discovered east of the Sierra Nevada mountains. By the late 1870s, the site had grown to become a boomtown called Bodie with some 10,000 residents. By 1915, the gold was gone, and people had to leave the town for good.
Bodie became an unintentional time capsule because it’s more than 2,500 meters (8,300 ft) above sea level. In the early 20th century, it wasn’t easy to get in and out of the little town. As a result, the residents left most of their possessions there as it was too expensive to have them hauled over miles of mountain trails.
In 1962, California State Parks stepped in to establish the ghost town as Bodie State Historic Park. It is preserved in an arrested state, so nothing is disturbed except for the occasional repair to ensure that a wall or roof remains intact.
The place is exactly what people envision a ghost town to be. But more than that, it’s a glimpse back in time to the Old West without the kitschy tourist traps found in places like Tombstone.[2]
Completely Intact Shoe Store Rediscovered After Half A Century
From the 1940s to the 1960s, the Fashion Shoe Shop stood as a staple mom-and-pop store. But it eventually shut down. Years later, it was bequeathed to a man who went by to see what the property looked like. He found a shoe store that had been shuttered several decades earlier.
The shop was something of a step back in time as the shoe store looked just as it had when the doors were locked years earlier. Instead of cleaning out an abandoned space, the new owner found a treasure in perfectly preserved vintage shoes. As the shoes were still inside their boxes, they were preserved without damage from dust, mold, or anything else.[3]
The time capsule was also filled with fashion from previous eras. In such well-preserved conditions, the items were worth quite a lot of money. In addition, the shop had a Victrola Credenza Talking Machine full of vintage records, a vintage stove, and more incredible finds from 40 years ago when the shop was closed.
Abandoned Home In Ontario Revealed A Link To The Past
Not every abandoned property is a decaying mess that people should avoid. Occasionally, a place will turn up something surprising, which is exactly what happened when a home in Ontario, Canada, was discovered by an urban explorer in 2013.
The home wasn’t in the best shape. But looking past the “usual smell of decay and years of abandonment” revealed a hidden gem showcasing how people lived in the 1960s when the property was abandoned.
Inside the home was a plethora of items from the 1960s and earlier, including several musical instruments, a shaving kit, a shoeshine polish kit, a cache of vinyl albums, cartons of food far beyond their expiration dates, furniture, books, clocks, televisions, a gramophone, a piano, jewelry, and two complete sets of polished silverware, which are worth their weight in . . . well, silver.
It’s unclear why the home was abandoned with everything left inside. But it helps to paint a picture of the people who lived there more than 50 years before the property was rediscovered.[4]
A Shop Boarded Up For 30 Years In Lancashire
Typically, when a shop goes out of business, its contents are sold, the building is vacated, and then it’s taken over by someone else. But something that seldom happens turned up in Accrington, Lancashire, in October 2008.
As builders were working in the area, they uncovered a shop that had been boarded up for at least 30 years. Instead of a decrepit empty space, they found a perfectly preserved corner shop and ice cream parlor. It was filled with items from the shop’s earliest days in the 1920s to products dating to the early 1970s.[5]
These included cigarette advertisements from the 1950s, a magazine that went through the day-by-day happenings of then Princess Elizabeth’s tour of Australia in 1938, old-fashioned sweet jars, and ice cream spoons. The original owners had left the property over 30 years earlier without removing the contents.
Paperwork found within the shop dated back more than 80 years. It indicated that the establishment had belonged to the Boyd family for several generations. The building was renovated, but the items were preserved by the developer.
A Victorian-Era Pharmacy Hidden For 80 Years In Somerset Village
In the early 1800s, John Wellington opened a chemist shop at South Petherton, Somerset. He also sold groceries. After John’s passing in 1845, the shop stayed in his family for more than four decades. Then it was sold to W.C. White in 1887.
White operated the shop’s chemist side until he died in 1909. Then his son and heir, Charles White, continued with the grocery business only. Charles wasn’t qualified to dispense medications, so the store’s chemist side was sealed behind a locked door.
Despite having several other owners, it remained that way until 1987. That year, the shop was sold and the locked door was finally opened. Inside was the chemist shop precisely as it had looked when it was sealed 78 years earlier.
The Victorian-era pharmacy was purchased in its entirety by Flambards Theme Park in Cornwall. The shop was moved and reestablished exactly as it had looked nearly a century before. Some items didn’t make the transition—but not because they were damaged.
Certain chemicals were now considered dangerous and deadly. They were confiscated by the British Home Office. But everything else has been perfectly maintained and preserved.[6]
A Long-Forgotten Closet Revealed A Treasure Trove Of Civil War Artifacts
In 2010, the former Carnegie Library in San Antonio, Texas, was undergoing some renovations when something unexpected turned up. The workers found a closet that had been walled up in the early 1950s. Inside, they discovered a treasure trove of artifacts dating back to the US Civil War.
More than 200 items were found in the closet. Although most were from the Civil War era, the oldest was a priceless copy of the 1615 King James Bible printed in London. Beth Graham, a spokesperson for the library system, described it as “in astoundingly good shape for being nearly 400 years old.”[7]
At least one document was dated 1861. According to Graham, another was “a proclamation by the Governor of New Mexico calling up the militia to repel Confederate raiders coming into the territory from Texas.”
Several magazines were dated 1952, which suggests that the closet was walled up before the building housed the Hertzberg Circus Museum in the late 1960s. The library staff cataloged the items and put them on display at the San Antonio Public Library.
Parisian Apartment Left Untouched For 70 Years Discovered In 2010
In 1942, as the Nazis invaded Paris, playwright Solange Beaugiron, the granddaughter of Madame Marthe de Florian, fled the city. Beaugiron left behind her apartment but continued to pay the rent until her death at age 91, almost 70 years later.
It is believed that Beaugiron didn’t return at all between 1942 and her death in 2010. So the apartment remained closed. Initially Marthe de Florian’s home, it was filled with opulent furniture and paintings. All of them remained untouched.[8]
The apartment was finally opened in 2010. Although it was an amazing unintentional time capsule of 1940s Parisian life, it also contained many valuable artifacts. One such item was a portrait of de Florian by Giovanni Boldini. It sold at auction for €3 million, a record for the artist.
Other paintings by famous artists, ornate furniture, a piano, a phonograph, and much more were uncovered in the apartment. Somehow, the place survived World War II without a scratch as did everything sealed inside.
Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Chemistry Lab Found Hidden Behind Wall
From HERE.
Conservators working at the University of Virginia’s Rotunda have inadvertently uncovered a chemical hearth designed by Thomas Jefferson. The discovery is offering fresh insights into how chemistry was taught over 200 years ago.
The iconic Rotunda, constructed in 1826, is located on The Lawn of the original grounds of the University of Virginia and is currently undergoing renovations. Inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, Thomas Jefferson designed it to symbolize the “authority of nature and power of reason” and the separation of church and education.
Back in 1895, a fire destroyed much of the building’s interior. But during the 1850s, the chemical hearth—part of an early chemistry classroom—was sealed in one of the lower-floor walls of the Rotunda, which protected it from the fire. Recently, while preparing for the current renovations, workers examining the cavities in the walls unexpectedly discovered the lost chemistry hearth.
Back in Jefferson’s day, chemistry was taught on the Rotunda’s bottom floor. His collaborator, professor of natural history John Emmet, taught the classes. UVA Today explains how it worked:
The chemical hearth was built as a semi-circular niche in the north end of the Lower East Oval Room. Two fireboxes provided heat (one burning wood for fuel, the other burning coal), underground brick tunnels fed fresh air to fireboxes and workstations, and flues carried away the fumes and smoke. Students worked at five workstations cut into stone countertops. Brian Hogg, senior historic preservation planner in the Office of the Architect for the University, said the chemical hearth may have been for Emmet’s use; the students may have had portable hearths with which they conducted experiments. “Back then, the different experiments would get different levels of heat from different sources,” said Jody Lahendro, a supervisory historic preservation architect for U.Va.’s Facilities Management. “For some, they would put the heat source under a layer of sand to more evenly disperse and temper the heat.”
According to Hogg, this may be the oldest intact example of early chemical education in the United States.
The University of Virginia will put the chemical hearth on display once renovations are complete.
Now some other stuff…
All of this stuff is interesting and a curiosity. There is no question about that. But what about today? What about your life now? What about things, people, places, food, friends, drink, pets and other interests? Well…
…lucky for you all, I have some videos that I am gonna deposit here for your enjoyment. And as you look at them remember that those relics that you read about are from another person’s time; another person’s life. But this time; this life, is yours NOW.
Make it a good one.
Please contribute. Don’t disparage.
Check out this guy who used to ice skate when he was in elementary school, and then life carried him away. Now, for the first time in 50 years, he tries to ice skate again. Not so easy is it? video
Remember!
You are not your age. You are not your color, nationality, your style, your wealth. You are not your job. You are not your career or your education. You are very unique and you are very, very special.
Never forget that.
Here’s a video where a middle-school student discovers what her dad does for a living. It’s a bit of a shock, but you know what…? It doesn’t matter. video.
What the world needs now is more understanding; more humanity; and more kindness. Help others. Be the Rufus. Show understanding, compassion and kindness. Help others. And when someone is in need, help them.
Finally…
Do not be afraid to volunteer. You can join the volunteer fire department, be an auxiliary in the police. Help in the local community. Volunteer at the food pantry. Go to the local humane society and just volunteer. Be part of the community. Smile. Make friends.
Act like a real Rufus does. Video.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Please have a wonderful day.
Do you want more?
I have more posts like this in my Happiness Index here…
Life & Happiness.
Articles & Links
Master Index.
- You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
- You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
- You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
- You can find out more about the author HERE.
- If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
- If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.
