Time Capsule Buried by Paul Revere and Sam Adams Discovered in Boston

On a snowy December afternoon in 2014, maintenance crews repairing a water leak at the Massachusetts State House in Boston exposed a cornerstone sealed more than two centuries earlier. Inside sat a corroded copper alloy box, a little smaller than a cigar box, holding coins, newspapers, a medal depicting George Washington, and a silver plaque attributed to Paul Revere. The capsule had been placed there on July 4, 1795 by Governor Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and William Scollay, in a procession that began in downtown Boston and ended on Beacon Hill, where Charles Bulfinch’s new State House was still under construction. For researchers of Native America, the find is more than a Revolutionary relic. It is a date stamp on an era when the young republic was burying its own memory while redrawing the map of Indigenous homelands from the Ohio Country to the Finger Lakes.

The Discovery Beneath Beacon Hill

The capsule surfaced in December 2014, when workers repairing a leak dislodged the cornerstone from the building and propped it up on wooden blocks. Staff from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston were called in, and conservator Pam Hatchfield spent hours on her back in the wind and snow, tapping away plaster with hand tools and pausing periodically to warm herself. As she worked, tiny silver coins fell loose, tossed into the mortar by public officials for good luck during an earlier reburial ceremony in 1855.

State police transported the box to the museum, where it was X-rayed and opened with conservation tools. The contents dated across two centuries: silver and copper coins minted between 1652 and 1855, folded newspapers, a Washington medal, and the silver plaque believed to have been engraved by Revere himself, a working silversmith before he became a legend of the midnight ride.

The Men Who Buried It

The 1795 deposit reflected Boston’s revolutionary establishment in formal procession. Samuel Adams, by then governor of Massachusetts, had moved from agitator to chief executive; Paul Revere had parlayed his craft and his 1775 ride into civic standing; and William Scollay, a Boston merchant and officeholder, lent the ceremony municipal weight. Their capsule was a statement of inherited authority, deposited on the nation’s birthday, above a city that had expelled its royal governor only two decades before.

The Ancestral Ground Beneath the Cornerstone

The State House rises on land once owned by John Hancock, the state’s first elected governor, atop a hill that carried a warning beacon as early as the 1630s. The peninsula itself, Shawmut, is the ancestral homeland of the Massachusett, an Algonquian-speaking people whose name the colony and the state both borrow. By 1795 the Massachusett had endured epidemics, war, and land loss; many lived in praying towns such as Natick, established in 1651. Neighboring homelands belonged to the Wampanoag to the southeast and the Nipmuc inland. The cornerstone, in other words, was laid in ground already steeped in Indigenous history that the 1795 ceremony did not acknowledge.

1795 Through Native Eyes: Treaties, Wampum, and the Price of Independence

The American Revolution fractured Native diplomacy rather than unifying it. The Oneida and Tuscarora of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy largely supported the Patriot cause, and Mohican soldiers from Stockbridge served in a Continental regiment, suffering devastating losses in 1778. Most Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga fighters, including Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), sided with Britain. When the Treaty of Paris ended the war in 1783, no Native nation signed it, yet the British ceded vast interior territories they did not own, and the United States treated Native nations as defeated dependents.

The Proclamation Line and Its Aftermath

That outcome had roots in the Proclamation of 1763, which sought to reserve lands west of the Appalachians for Native nations and infuriated colonial speculators. The measure satisfied almost no one: it restricted Indigenous sovereignty while failing to stop westward settlement, and it became one more grievance feeding the Revolutionary crisis.

The Treaty of Greenville and the Ohio Country

Within months of the Boston ceremony, on August 3, 1795, the United States signed the Treaty of Greenville, ending the Northwest Indian War after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. Representatives of the Wyandot, Delaware, Shawnee, Ottawa, Chippewa, Potawatomi, Miami, Wea, Kickapoo, Piankashaw, and Kaskaskia ceded roughly two-thirds of present-day Ohio. The same year that Adams and Revere sealed a box to preserve the republic’s memory, Native nations were signing away the physical ground of their own.

Wampum as Indigenous Archive

Native diplomacy kept records too, but in shell rather than silver. The Treaty of Canandaigua of November 11, 1794, negotiated by Timothy Pickering with the Six Nations, affirmed Haudenosaunee land rights and is still commemorated annually. Its covenant was bound in wampum belts used as records of diplomacy, woven from quahog and whelk shell, whose patterns encoded agreements and could be read aloud by appointed speakers. Where the Boston capsule preserved coins and newsprint, Haudenosaunee belt keepers preserved obligations. Both were time capsules; only one was treated as law by the parties who made it.

Two Reburials, Two Eras of Memory

The capsule was first opened in 1855, during emergency repairs to the building. Its original cowhide container was replaced with the copper box, officials added silver coins for luck, and the whole assemblage was reburied. It stayed sealed until the 2014 leak. That same autumn, the Old State House — built in 1713, Boston’s oldest surviving public building and now a museum — produced its own sensation when officials opened a 113-year-old capsule recovered from the head of the golden lion statue atop the roof. Letters, photographs, and newspapers inside survived in near-perfect condition.

After examination, the Revere-Adams capsule went on display at the Museum of Fine Arts until June 2015, then was returned to the cornerstone with modern currency added, a deliberate act of continuation rather than mere conservation.

Historical Context & Key Cultural Takeaways

• A documented cornerstone deposit: The capsule was placed July 4, 1795 by Governor Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and William Scollay, and rediscovered in December 2014 during leak repairs.
• Material evidence of two centuries: Its coins span 1652 to 1855, preserving both the original 1795 deposit and the 1855 reburial in a single assemblage.
• A contested ground: The State House stands on Massachusett homelands, on a peninsula whose Indigenous history predates the Federalist architecture by millennia.
• A parallel record: While Boston sealed coins in stone, Haudenosaunee diplomats sealed the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua in wampum, a living record still held and honored by Native nations.
• Scholarly consensus: Historians regard the Revolutionary era as simultaneous liberation and dispossession, and the capsule is best read as an artifact of both truths.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who placed the time capsule and when?

According to historical accounts, Samuel Adams, then governor of Massachusetts, Paul Revere, and William Scollay placed the original contents in 1795, in a ceremony that began in downtown Boston and ended at the State House, still under construction and completed in 1798.

What was found inside the copper box?

Silver and copper coins dated 1652 to 1855, newspapers, a medal depicting George Washington, and a silver plaque believed to have been engraved by Paul Revere. Additional silver coins were found loose in the surrounding plaster, added by officials during the 1855 reburial.

Why was the capsule opened and resealed more than once?

It was first removed in 1855 during emergency building repairs, when its cowhide container was swapped for a copper box and the contents reburied. It remained sealed until December 2014, was exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, and was returned to the cornerstone in 2015.

How does this story connect to Native American history?

The capsule belongs to the same decade as the Treaty of Canandaigua (1794) and the Treaty of Greenville (1795), when the United States formalized land cessions with Native nations. Indigenous diplomacy preserved its agreements in wampum belts, which remain in tribal care as binding records rather than curiosities.

Where can the artifacts be seen today?

The capsule contents were displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through June 2015 before reburial. Comparable materials from the Old State House lion capsule and other Boston collections survive in museum archives, while Haudenosaunee wampum belts associated with 1794 remain with the nations that keep them.

Cultural Legacy and Modern Preservation

The Revere-Adams capsule endures because Boston chose to rebury it rather than retire it, adding modern coins so that a future generation inherits both the original deposit and proof of our own attention. That instinct — to seal, to remember, to hand forward — is not uniquely colonial. It is the same obligation that Haudenosaunee belt keepers honor when they recite the Covenant Chain, and the same duty that compels the Stockbridge-Munsee and Massachusett today to keep their histories visible despite centuries of erasure. Read carefully, a small corroded box from Beacon Hill is a lesson in what a nation chooses to preserve, and what it once chose to forget.