BETHLEHEM, Pa. – From midsummer gossip, warnings of rising rivers, to a summer heat wave, the eight area newspapers, pictures, and ads, all perfectly preserved, are part of an 1891 time capsule recently found in the cornerstone of Bethlehem’s Main Street Commons building.<\/p>\n
Owners Lou Pektor and his daughter Lisa led the discovery mission.<\/p>\n
“It’s truly amazing how well preserved it is. Really lends itself to the ingenuity and, you know, effort that the original depositors put into putting it in a place that was going to be able to stand the test of time,” Lisa said.<\/p>\n
Known at one time as the Beehive, the grand Mercantile Emporium was owned by Frank Lerch and then Joseph Rice. In August of 1891, Rice’s twin daughters headlined the burial time capsule ceremony.<\/p>\n
“The time capsule was meant to be found,” said historian Jack Stanley.<\/p>\n
Stanley found news of the burial in an online archive. He contacted the Pektors and the rest, as they say, is history.<\/p>\n
“For them to have a ceremony in Bethlehem with those little girls’ deposit in that box, hoping that someday in the future, somebody will find it and read it. It’s like, it gives me goosebumps to think about it,” he said.<\/p>\n
Drilling vibrations, not goosebumps, accessed the copper-lined box.<\/p>\n
“That’s in surprisingly good shape. They soldered it shut,” Lou Pektor could be heard saying in a video of the copper box being found.<\/p>\n
History was revealed. Evan Blose and his father were the metal detecting team that discovered its location.<\/p>\n
“The contents in here are just pristine, which is incredible. I mean, I’ve been a fan of Indiana Jones and those kind of things, and just never thought I would find anything this old or anything like that,” he said.<\/p>\n
The Pektors are working with Historical Bethlehem Museum and Sites, on its future display.<\/p>\n
“This is from 1846,” Stanley said while showing a handwritten letter.<\/p>\n
Headlines are making news two centuries later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BETHLEHEM, Pa. – From midsummer gossip, warnings of rising rivers, to a summer heat wave, the eight area…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1377,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[214,153,155,154,1391],"class_list":["post-1376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-bethlehem-area"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}