City Hall Cornerstone Time Capsule

On August 18, 1888, the city gathered to witness Mayor Patrick O'Mullin lay the cornerstone of City Hall. The cornerstone is engraved: 

The stone was laid / August 18, 1888 / by / Patrick O’Mullin / Mayor of Halifax / Edward Elliot / Architect / Rhodes, Curry & co. / Builder.

Before laying the cornerstone, a copper box containing items marking the event and time period was placed inside. Once the cornerstone had been laid, the mayor tapped it three times with a mallet before declaring it "well and truly laid,” a Masonic ritual that aligns with the theory that Mayor O’Mullin and several council members as Freemasons planned the cornerstone laying according to Masonic traditions. Read the Mayor's address.

If you go looking for City Hall’s cornerstone you may be puzzled as it is not in either of the south/Grand Parade-facing corners. Walk around to the corner of Duke and Barrington Streets and crane your neck to see it 28 feet above the sidewalk. Odd? The hard-to-reach placement may have been dictated by the Masonic tradition of laying the stone at the northeast corner and above the foundation. You can see in the above photograph of the cornerstone-laying that the attendees are high above Duke Street on scaffolding and what would have been the ground floor under construction. 

Contents of the 1888 time capsule

Like most time capsules, City Hall's contained items evocative of the time period (newspapers of the day, annual reports from City departments, coins), and items commemorative of the event (the invitation, order of the procession, and mayor’s address).

The copper box also contained business cards for architect Edward Elliot, and a list of the names of men employed by Rhodes, Curry and Co. to construct the building. The list was neatly folded inside an envelope labelled: “To the unknown of 2032,” suggesting the box was not meant to be opened until 2032. In trying to determine the significance of the year 2032, archivists note that it is 144 years after the time capsule was created in 1888.  A dozen dozen is a symbolically significant number, but contact the Archives if you have a theory.

View a sample of the time capsule contents below and the full list in the Archives Database.

Opening of the time capsule, 1988

Sometime during the mid-1980s while preparing for the centennial celebrations for City Hall, former alderman and chairman of the centennial celebration committee Robert Stapells became aware that a box had been placed in the cornerstone of City Hall. It wasn't known when the time capsule was intended to be opened and a hundred years later seemed an appropriate time. Stapells consulted with stonemasons and determined it was possible to remove the box without damaging the cornerstone. In the middle of the night on July 28, 1988, the copper box was removed from the cornerstone and transported to the vault at police headquarters until the centennial celebrations. 

On August 10, 1988, the City Hall centennial celebrations took place in the newly renovated Halifax Hall. Past and present city officials gathered for a breakfast, an open house of the newly renovated City Hall, a luncheon, and a ceremony in which Robert Stapells, Mayor Ron Wallace and civic historian Lou Collins presided over the opening of the sealed copper box revealing the items placed by their predecessors 100 years before.

Creating a new time capsule for 2088

Bob Stapells spearheaded the idea of creating a new time capsule “with definite instruction to be opened August 18, 2088”, the 200th anniversary of the original laying of the City Hall cornerstone. This time capsule was to be placed in Grand Parade as it was expected to be larger than the original. Mayor Wallace encouraged the public to submit items and/or ideas of things to be included in the time capsule. The response from the public was overwhelming, with hundreds of suggestions received, and officials delayed the sealing of the time capsule to determine what to include. 

Newspaper articles from 1988 provide details about the time capsule opening, plans for the 2088 time capsule, criticism of the expensive renovations that had recently been done to City Hall, and public opinion at the time.

The time capsule for 2088 was never completed or interred under Grand Parade. In 2007, Stapells returned the capsule to HRM and it was transferred to the Halifax Municipal Archives. The unfinished time capsule has 172 items in it, including envelopes from city officials, businesses, committees, families and churches addressed “Time Capsule, 2088”; a Rita MacNeil television special; a Schooner Lager beer can; a sterling silver pin of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia building; a Town Crier pin; an audiocassette of the 1988 Nova Scotia International Tattoo; a small wooden roulette rake; and booklets on the 1988 Buskers Festival. Since an archives is like an open time capsule, items are being actively preserved there and can be viewed, except for the sealed messages from citizens and officials to their future counterparts; these will be opened as intended August 18, 2088 - save the date! It has been registered with the International Time Capsule Society, so hopefully we'll get it right next time!