Is A Silk Purse Better Than An Ammo Can?

[CacheNCarryMA]

From the local paper in Middletown, NY

Silk purse reveals time capsule

 

  By Dianna Cahn

  Times Herald-Record

  dcahn@th-record.com

 

  Middletown – Matthew Van Dyk had clambered up the rickety wooden church ladder to hang decorations for Bible school when he reached above a cornice feeling for something on which to hang a string of flags.

  Instead, Van Dyk pulled out a piece of history – a century unfolding in a woman's pocketbook, a time capsule high above the stage in the Unionville Presbyterian Church.

  "I looked over [the cornice] and saw the purse," said Van Dyk, 15. "I dropped it down and then everybody started running over and getting excited."

  The purse was a small dyed-silk change purse with an old-fashioned metal snap top. Inside were coins dating from 1918 to 1942 and a folded up note: a piece of paper that spanned the decades with a line added for each time the purse was found and replaced.

  "This purse was first left here in 1910 by John Paugh and Will Rutan when they remodeled the church," it said. "And in 1925, it was taken out when Will Rutan and Fred Myers redecorated."

  The next line was from 1949, when the purse was taken out and returned again to its hiding place.

 

  UNIONVILLE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH was founded as a tiny congregation that met in someone's home in 1803. Congregants built the church building in 1825, a white wooden structure on Main Street. It was remodeled in 1855 and again in 1910, when Paugh and Rutan, likely at the prompting of the purse owner, left the keepsake for the next century of churchgoers.

  It was a time when women were coming into their own. They marched for suffrage, while Negroes and unions struggled to gain basic rights. William Howard Taft was president. Ragtime and the Ziegfeld Follies were all the rage. Fast cars and photographs became the thing of the everyman and a gallon of milk cost 32 cents.

  In October 1949, Dan Monahan added his name and three others to the note in the purse.

  Now it was a post-war world run by President Harry Truman. New alliances were drawn across Europe, Germany was divided in two, and 12 countries established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Meanwhile at home, cable TV made its debut, and Marilyn Monroe was seducing the nation with her lilting diamond tribute. The price of a postage stamp was 3 cents and the Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in what was to become an unprecedented five-year World Series winning streak.

  Another 19 years passed. Henry Kithcart, a contractor in his early 40s, and four workers were remodeling the church on Nov. 25, 1967, when they came across the purse.

  Renovations took three months, and on Jan. 19, 1968, the day after President Johnson's State of the Union address, Kithcart placed the purse – along with a new note explaining his renovations and a Times Herald-Record from that day – into a larger vinyl pocketbook, which he then replaced on the ledge.

  "LBJ: Americans have the strength to meet every challenge," read the newspaper's headline that day in 1968. We were a country at war in a deadly, faraway jungle. The nation was in turmoil. Protests, rock 'n' roll and civil rights were the causes of the outspoken and the young, while a bewildered older generation struggled to understand.

  "This could be today," said Karen Hughes, one of the summer Bible school leaders, as she read the 1968 front-page article.

  "'Americans have the strength to meet every challenge,'" she read aloud. Then she looked up, and laughed. "Henry read it cover to cover."

  Kithcart, now 77, was church deacon, elder and trustee over the years. But he suffered some memory loss from illness and doesn't remember much about the purse. "I am just glad it was found again," he said. "And I am here to see it."

  Hughes and other parishioners plan to put the purse and all the pieces of its timeline back in place later this week.

  They will include their own small note, a church bulletin and a Times Herald-Record with this article, for future generations to find in their own time.

Edited July 28, 2004 by CacheNCarryMA

[+AuntieWeasel]

Oh, that is way cool!

[+Milbank]

cool,

[lowracer]

Can anyone post coords for that? That sounds like an interesting micro.

[+El Diablo]

Very interesting story! I wonder how long before someone opens the purse and sees "TNLN"?

 

El Diablo

[+Robespierre]

Wish the kid had had more stealth.

[+tirediron]

Wow... the REAL original Geocache?