VCU news

By Gary Robertson

The drab copper box was about the size of a big loaf of bread, and not very pretty.

But for Jodi L. Koste, archivist for the Tompkins-McCaw Library on Virginia Commonwealth University’s MCV Campus, it was a precious arrival from the past.

“All in wonderful condition!” Koste exclaimed Wednesday as she examined the contents of the nearly 74-year-old time capsule, which she had hand carried to her library office.

Just moments earlier the capsule had been chiseled out of the old A.D. Williams Clinic at 1201 E. Marshall St. after construction workers broke free the cornerstone that had hidden the box since Dec. 1, 1936, when the cornerstone was laid.

Inside the box Koste found a fund-raising brochure for what was then called the Medical College of Virginia that she had never seen before – a rare find for the archivist – and a letter from MCV President Dr. William T. Sanger.

The envelope had a warning that it should not be opened, until the time capsule had been unsealed.

Reading the letter, Koste found the reason for the warning: Sanger revealed that the biggest donation for the clinic, $300,000, was an anonymous gift from A.D. Williams of Richmond and his wife, local philanthropists and tobacco heirs.

Under the terms of the gift, the couple’s identity had to be kept secret until after their deaths. The building, the A.D. Williams Memorial Clinic & Laboratories, was named for them on March 21, 1952.

The other financing for the building, $239,850, came from the Public Works Administration (PWA), a Depression-era agency focused on the construction of large-scale public projects for the purposes of providing employment and helping to revive American industry.

The PWA was headed by Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes. Sanger, who apparently favored large public events to celebrate construction projects on the MCV Campus, persuaded Ickes to come to Richmond and had the governor of Virginia introduce him.

The actual laying of the cornerstone involved an elaborate Masonic ceremony – a commonplace event in those days -- conducted by the members of Richmond Lodge No. 10, A.F. & A.M.

As fortune would have it, the removal of the cornerstone and retrieval of the time capsule fell to another Mason, Ed Koppelman, senior general superintendent for the Gilbane Building Company.

Gilbane has been contracted to conduct the demolition of the A.D. Williams Clinic and is contracted to construct the new, $158 million education building for the School of Medicine on the same site.

When the time capsule was removed from behind the cornerstone, Koppelman handed it to Koste. Then, Koste and a group of construction workers moved inside the A.D. Williams building to find a safe way to remove the soldering sealing the time capsule without damaging the contents inside.

A torch and a grinder were considered and rejected.

In the end, Koppelman used the simplest of instruments -- a hammer and screwdriver – to chip open the time capsule, before handing it back to Koste.

“Masons put it in, a Mason took it out – full circle,” Koppelman said with a smile.

As she stood over a table in the Tompkins-McCaw Library looking at the objects that had emerged from the time capsule – newspaper clippings, issues of the Skull & Bones student newspaper, a copy of the charter of the Medical College of Virginia -- Koste said the objects themselves did not hold the most meaning for her.

What meaning the objects did hold, she said, was that “Dr. Sanger and other officials of MCV were the last to have their hands on them before me.

Koste, who began working on the medical campus in 1978, said that the A.D. Williams time capsule was the fifth such capsule to be found on the MCV Campus.

“There are three more,” she said, including one in the Tompkins-McCaw Library itself.