WILMINGTON — New construction downtown has unearthed a little piece of Wilmington’s history, dating back to 1914.
This week the Cape Fear Museum officially accepted a donation of a time capsule, discovered in the cornerstone of the Monteith Construction building at 208 Princess Street. The capsule was discovered as workers drilled a passage through the stone to install piping – boring a hole almost directly through the 104-year-old box.
When staff at Monteith realized what they had found, they called the Cape Fear Museum and asked if they could donate the artifacts.
For the last three weeks, Heather Yenco, museum curator at Cape Fear Museum, has been painstaking cleaning the contents of the capsule, which was blasted with silt and water.
From what Yenco can tell, the capsule was placed in the cornerstone of the building by a member of the Knights of Pythias, possibly Thomas Meares – whose photo was included in the capsule. Meares was apparently the Supreme Master of Exchequer, the group’s chief accountant for the region.
The Knights, like the Masons, are a fraternal organization — often called a secret society — dedicated to “friendship, charity, and benevolence,” according to its charter. Found in 1864, the Knights were by some accounts part of an effort to provide stability in the war-ravaged United States, and worked to maintain social bridges – in part through tourism – between North and South.
The Knights were open to all men in good health, although lodges were split along racial lines for some time after the Civil War, in some places until the 1950s.
The Knights were staunchly against the illicit alcohol trade during prohibition, and also explicitly required members to reject both fascism and Communism when they were sworn in.
At the height of popularity of fraternal organizations, the Knights may have had as many as 1 million members –– those numbers are much smaller now, closer to 50,000 worldwide.
According to Yenco, one branch of the Knights actually split off and became an independent insurance company, the American United Insurance Company.
While the Knights were not associated with the more well-known Masons, the time capsule also includes several pieces of Masonic paraphernalia as well as a book from the humbly-named Supreme Council of the Royal Arcanum, another fraternal order founded in Boston in 1877. According to Yenco, this at least suggests some overlap between the social circles of the different fraternal orders.
Yenco said the building, designed by Wilmington architect Henry Bonitz, was likely finished in the same year as the time capsule, 1914. Yenco added it wasn’t uncommon for buildings in that era to have time capsules.
“Well, it’s not uncommon for a building of that era to have a capsule in the center stone,” Yenco said. “But it is uncommon to find one.”
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