… but not wine, as with the 1870 courthouse
The rededication of the cornerstone at the Greene County courthouse Sunday will be a unique experience not likely to happen again this century. It will be similar in some ways to the first dedication ceremony May 15, 1916, but different in other ways.
The ceremony will be held on the lawn at the northeast corner of the courthouse, as it was in 1916. The Masonic Grand Lodge will conduct a public dedication ritual, as in 1916. There will also once again be a presentation of a time capsule.
This time, though, the audience will be able to hear the speakers. The news account from 1916 notes that the ceremony was “one of the most impressive ceremonies ever enacted in the county of Greene,” but that “the wind was of such a noisy sort as to prevent the hearing of what was said except those nearest to those taking part.”
Don Van Gilder, chair of the Courthouse 100 committee, planner of the event, is also a guru of sound systems. Sound equipment not available in 1916 will assure the audience can hear.
Also different will be the receptacle and placement of the new time capsule. Sunday’s event will include a reading of the souvenirs and memorabilia in the first time capsule, but they won’t be viewed. The 1916 time capsule was a copper receptacle placed in the ground before the cornerstone was placed. It can’t be opened until the courthouse is demolished down to the foundation.
Items for the 2016 time capsule will not be viewed, either, as some have not yet been gathered. Among other items, the Courthouse 100 committee plans to include the 2016 Business & Tourism Guide published by the Greene County Chamber of Commerce, and the 2015-16 yearbooks from Greene County and Paton-Churdan high schools. Those items are not yet available.
Items will be placed in a custom-made steel box. Van Gilder will read a list of the intended contents including a Greene County flag; this week’s edition of The Scranton Journal and The Jefferson Herald, and screenshots of the landing pages of Raccoon Valley Radio’s and GreeneCountyNewsOnline’s websites; a proof set of 2016 coins; a current plat book; the county’s FY 2016 budget; a listing of the elected officials of the county, all Greene County towns and school districts; and more.
The steel box will be sealed when its contents are complete and it will be put on a shelf in the vault in the county auditor’s office. The intention is that it will be opened in May 2116.
There should be no surprises like one unearthed in 1915 when the county’s first brick courthouse was removed from its foundation to make way for the current courthouse. (The red brick courthouse was moved to the west, still on the courthouse grounds, and used until the current building was completed in 1917.)
According to the Jefferson Bee of July 8, 1915, when the courthouse was moved off its foundation workers found a half-gallon jug of wine placed there in 1870.
The jug, “of quaint, old fashioned form,” was found when the contractor moving the building made the first hole through the foundation. The article explained that just a month earlier, Mr Jesse Perkins, “Jefferson’s long time settler,” had said a jug of wine was placed there by the crew who built the brick courthouse. Perkins didn’t remember their names. The article in The Bee said that in 1915, the jug was three-fourths full, “probably losing some of its contents by evaporation during the long years of its concealment.”
The jug was put into the possession of county auditor McCully.
The 1915 article mentioned papers and documents in the cornerstone not far from the jug “which will, no doubt, be recovered at the proper time. Those relics should be carefully preserved and placed in some public place in the new Court House. Their historical value will increase as the years go by.”
Research about what those documents might be, and a search for them, have not yet been done.
The rededication ceremony will begin at 2 pm. Those attending should bring lawn chairs. The event will be followed at 2:45 by a program at the historical museum featuring architect Steve Stimmel of Brooks Borg Skiles, a successor company to Proudfoot & Bird, the company that designed the Greene County courthouse.
