SOUTH PORTLAND – While Scarborough’s lost time capsule was recently uncovered, South Portland had less luck May 14 when it tried to uncover a time capsule buried 25 years ago at Brown Elementary School.

“Although Maietta Construction offered to dig as long as it took, and one resident even volunteered to come back with special sonar equipment, we decided it was time to give up after 10 holes,” Principal Margaret Hawkins said on Tuesday.

The excavation was part of Brown’s 75th anniversary celebration and while the old capsule appears lost to time, a new one containing student writing and drawing on the theme “What Brown School means to me” was buried in its place, to be opened in 2038.

“That one is well-marked so that in 25 years the staff won’t have such a hard time finding it,” Hawkins said.

As for the old capsule, Hawkins said longtime staffers who remember the original burial are not imagining things.

“There definitely was a time capsule that was buried 25 years ago,” she said, “but we’re thinking that perhaps during the renovations here in the 2003-2004 school year, the construction crews might have unearthed it and carted it away, not knowing what it was.”

South Portland also has at least one other time capsule, buried by high school students on May 28, 1976 in the green space at the corner of Mountain View and Nelson roads. Located somewhere in the mulch circle surrounding the large boulder in the park, the capsule, much more elaborate than either the Brown School or Scarborough McDonald’s iterations, contains books, magazines, records, early computer software, catalogs, yearbooks and city reports, as well as a Super 8 film shot by a history class. Also included are lottery tickets and the bankbook to an account that contained, at the time of burial, $117.76.

A full list of the capsule’s contents was published in the June 2, 1976, issue of the American Journal.

Superintendent Suzanne Godin was unaware of the capsule when asked about it last week, although she soon found “two or three” people on staff who remembered it.

Because the bronze marker that once covered the capsule was stolen some time ago, Godin said she hopes at some point to establish some process by which memory of the capsule is not lost with the last of those around for its 1976 burial.

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