Renovation crew discovers time capsule in Farber Hall datestone

Editor's note: This story is another installment of "UB Then," an occasional feature highlighting people, events and other interesting elements of UB history pulled from the University Archives. 

An observant crew member at work repairing the exterior masonry at Farber Hall recently prevented a piece of the past from accidentally landing in the trash.

That history was held in a fractured 1951 datestone, a ceremonial masonry stone to be replaced with a modern equivalent reflecting both Farber’s original construction and its current renovation. 

The rectangular datestone, similar in proportion to a large dresser drawer, contained a time capsule, tucked neatly into an opening at its base. That gap was apparently carved to accommodate the capsule’s dimensions, a copper box in this case, with any wiggle room between rock and metal filled by the poorly aging wooden shims holding it in place.

The worker spotted the box in the exposed base, just as the stone holding it was being lifted into a dumpster, and Kim Navarroli, director of facilities, design and construction, delivered the box to University Archives that same day.

“I love when these things are uncovered,” says Hope Dunbar, university archivist. “It’s such an interesting moment in time, like people from the past reaching forward to a present they could only imagine.”

Dunbar says time capsules symbolize optimism, and the construction of Farber offered plenty of it.

Noted scientists from across the country joined members of the then University of Buffalo and larger Western New York communities for the 1953 dedication of UB’s new medical-dental building, named in honor of Chancellor Emeritus Samuel P. Capen, a distinction announced three months earlier on his 75th birthday.

After the Capen name was moved to a building on the new North Campus, the South Campus building was rededicated in 1977 in honor of Buffalo native and UB alumnus Sidney Farber, a Harvard Medical School faculty member who is regarded as one of the founders of the specialty of pediatric pathology.

The $4.5 million building brought the university’s medical school, previously located at 24 High St. and its dental school, at 25 Goodrich St., under one roof on the South Campus.

It’s lecture halls, facilities and laboratories were designed “to provide each student with the stimulus and opportunity to develop his full potentiality for practice, teaching or research in an atmosphere of scholarship, discovery and professional example,” according to a Dec. 9, 1953, story in the Buffalo Courier-Express.

All 500 seats in the building’s Edward H. Butler auditorium were filled for the ceremony, with the overflow crowd moved to an adjacent, smaller auditorium.

“Three short years ago, this building seemed to many little more than a hope or a dream,” said Chancellor T. Raymond McConnell during his opening remarks at the dedication.

Finding the time capsule is an echo of McConnell’s excitement, a “message that people in the past wanted us to hear,” according to Erik Seeman, professor of history.

“Those who open time capsules feel the same sense of excitement that historians feel in the archives when someone from the past communicated with us in an especially vivid way,” he says.

Two years prior to the dedication, on Dec. 8, 1951, the time capsule was placed in the building’s datestone during an afternoon ceremony, with the Courier-Express reporting that meeting minutes related to the building’s construction, books and pamphlets dealing with UB’s history, and coins minted in 1951 as being among the contents.

University Archives has a complete list of items in the time capsule, printed on onion skin paper. Plans to open the capsule will be finalized once University Libraries has coordinated with representatives from the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and the School of Dental Medicine.

Meantime, Dunbar is compiling a list of known time capsules buried on campus that will be available to both the School of Architecture and Planning and University Facilities, who can look out for them during future renovation and construction projects.

“Archivists are trained to think 50, 100 or 200 years into the future, so I’m hoping as new construction continues on our campuses that we’ll continue this tradition of burying time capsules,” says Dunbar. “They represent a historical exercise that has everyone thinking to the future, while they eventually provide the future with a chance to think about the past.”