Kevin Rowe of Rowe’s Contracting on Wednesday, Sept. 14 builds a stone monument to house the town of Wilmington’s bicentennial time capsule at the Preston Festival Field. The time capsule, which will be opened in 50 years, will be dedicated at 10 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 17. (News photo — Andy Flynn)

WILMINGTON — On Tuesday morning, Sept. 13, Kevin Rowe and his crew at Rowe’s Contracting stopped by the town of Wilmington Highway Department to pick up some special stones for a special project.

The project — with historic importance for the past, present and future — is part of the town’s bicentennial celebration.

Later that day, Rowe and his employees began building a stone monument for the town’s 50-year time capsule at the Preston Festival Field on Springfield Road.

The time capsule will include newspaper clippings, books, photos, historic artifacts from local businesses and letters from local children to themselves; they hope to read those letters 50 years from now when the time capsule is opened.

The time capsule will be dedicated at 10 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 17. Time capsule committee chair Marjorie Swift will be there. On Wednesday, Sept. 14 — as Rowe was building the stone monument underneath a white tent — Swift showed off the metal plaque she ordered from Adirondack Awards in Lake Placid:

Wilmington Bicentennial Time Capsule Committee chairperson Marjorie Swift shows off the plaque for the time capsule on Wednesday, Sept. 14 at the Preston Festival Field. The time capsule, which will be opened in 50 years, will be dedicated at 10 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 17. Contents of the time capsule — after it is opened in 2072 — will be handed over to the Wilmington Historical Society. (News photo — Andy Flynn)

“Wilmington Bicentennial TIME CAPSULE sealed September 17, 2022 to be opened September 17, 2072. Sponsored by the Wolfe Family Descendants Town of Wilmington & Friends.”

The monument will be constructed of stones from the old Wilmington bridge over the West Branch of the Ausable River on state Route 86. It was torn down in the spring of 2015 and replaced with the current bridge that same year. Many of the stones from the 80-year-old bridge were saved for posterity and for projects such as this. The stone bridge replaced an iron bridge that was torn down in 1934.

Both the Whiteface Veterans Memorial Highway and bridge were finished in 1935, and the highway was dedicated on Sept. 14 of that year by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was New York state’s governor on Sept. 11, 1929, when he used a gold-plated shovel to turn the first earth for the construction of the highway.

Rowe and his crew broke ground on the time capsule project on Aug. 22, pouring a concrete pad for the monument.

The inspiration for Wilmington’s time capsule was sparked last November when Swift was attending a holiday ceremony at a park in the village of Warwick in New York’s Hudson River Valley.

These stones from the former bridge over the West Branch of the Ausable River on state Route 86 will be used to build a monument to house the Wilmington Bicentennial Time Capsule at the Preston Festival Field on Springfield Road. (News photo — Andy Flynn)

Warwick’s latest 50-year time capsule was sealed shut in 2017 during the village’s sesquicentennial celebration. That was shortly after the first time capsule was opened in August 2017, 50 years after it was placed in a monument during the village’s centennial celebration in 1967.

After the town of Wilmington bicentennial time capsule is opened in 2072, the contents will become property of the Wilmington Historical Society.

(Correction: This story was changed to reflect that Kevin Rowe stopped by the Wilmington Highway Department to pick up bridge stones for the time capsule project on Tuesday morning, Sept. 13, not Monday morning as previously reported. The News regrets the error.)

On March 2, 2015, crews from Tioga Construction began replacing the 80-year-old concrete-and-stone bridge over the West Branch of the AuSable River in Wilmington on state Route 86. The new bridge opened in May that year. (News photo — Andy Flynn)