A
small greenish box, disinterred from underneath Boston's State House
and containing 220-year-old relics from the United States' earliest
years, held a crowd breathless on Tuesday night as a museum conservator
delicately lifted its lid to see what lay inside.Revolutionary
war heroes Sam Adams and Paul Revere - patriots in American textbooks
and Boston lore - laid the capsule within the cornerstone of the State
House in 1795 to commemorate the building, the city, and the imminent
20th anniversary of American independence. In December, workers fixing a
water leak at the building discovered the box along with five embedded
coins, a good luck custom.
Two of the three men who placed the
box entered American mythology: Adams, the Massachusetts governor famous
for helping instigate the Boston tea party and the break with Britain,
and Revere, the artisan propagandist whose name has become synonymous
with his night ride before the war. The third man was Williams Scollay, a
war hero and deputy to Revere's grand master in the local Masonic
lodge.
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