For Its Birthday, the U.S. Will Give Americans of the Future a 900-Pound Time Capsule Filled With Art, Natural Treasures and a Clever Copy of the Declaration of Independence

The capsule was created and filled at the direction of Congress, through the America250 commission. It will be interred beneath an original sculpture on July 4

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

June 17, 2026 1:20 p.m.

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America has filled a steel container with prized possessions, and it’s about to be buried in Philadelphia. “America’s Time Capsule,” commissioned by Congress, will be interred on July 4—the country’s 250th birthday.

When the capsule is unsealed, intended for the United States’ 500th birthday in 2276, its excavators should find hundreds of items submitted by U.S. states and territories, the three branches of government and the project partners of the nonpartisan America250 commission. They’ll find poems, letters from governors, Native American artwork, a superconductor and parts of a whale and an eagle.

“Greetings from the living, breathing hearts and hands of 2026,” reads a letter sealed inside the capsule, written by Michael Berilla, leader of the team that created it. “We will have long since returned to dust, but our devotion, pride and unwavering hope for what our world could become are alive right here inside this steel. We built this for you.”

The time capsule has been in the works since 2016, when Congress created the America250 commission, which aims to commemorate and celebrate the semiquincentennial of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The law ordered that a time capsule be filled with, among other documents, “a representative portion of all books, manuscripts, miscellaneous printed matter, memorabilia, relics and other materials relating to the United States Semiquincentennial.”

Contributing to this task were scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), preservationists from the Library of Congress and experts from the National Park Service. According to a statement from America250, the team solicited time capsule contributions from state-specific commissions formed specifically for the endeavor. Some states submitted just one item; others gave more than five.

“It has to be sea-to-shining-sea,” Rosie Rios, chair of America250, tells CBS News’ Faith Salie. “It has to be grassroots, community-driven. It has to be personal.”

Maine gave a bone from a North Atlantic right whale, an endangered species. Michigan sent a Petoskey stone, one of the famed unique fossils native to Lake Michigan. Montana contributed an Arikara artist’s colorful buffalo made of beads. Puerto Rico submitted a Catholic rosary. Wisconsin gave a feather from the body of Old Abe, an American bald eagle who followed Union soldiers into battle during the Civil War.

“I'm glad there wasn’t really a prescription for it,” Tom Medema, a project manager for the time capsule, tells the Associated Press’ Holly Ramer. “I know that was hard for [the states], but in the end, it was just up to them to represent themselves.”

The artifacts and documents submitted by U.S. states and territories are accompanied in the capsule by a collection of materials from the Library of Congress. One of them is a tiny data storage device “about the length of a pencil eraser,” per the statement. It’s no flash drive. The device holds synthetic DNA, digitally encoded with Francis Scott Key’s handwritten “Star-Spangled Banner” lyrics, Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, and a 3D image of President Abraham Lincoln’s hand.

“There’s great hope in what this capsule represents and the messages that are put in it,” Medema tells the AP. “Something about this capsule has been truly uplifting for everyone who’s been involved in it.”

The container has been expertly designed to protect its fragile contents. As Medema tells Interlochen Public Radio’s Ed Ronco, engineers learned from others’ mistakes. In 2023, archaeologists at Westpoint—the U.S. Military Academy—discovered a time capsule buried in 1828.

“It was a metal box, and it basically, when they opened it was full of silt,” Medema says. There were some coins at the bottom. It may have held “some paper documents, maybe a flag,” but as for the rest, “we’ll never know.”

Berilla, director of the Fabrication Technology Office at NIST, tells CBS News that most time capsules fail because water gets inside. The NIST scientists initially considered shaping the America250 capsule like a box or a star, but settled on a cylinder design to eliminate edges and corners vulnerable to seepage. According to the statement, they ended up with a 900-pound, precision-milled stainless steel cylinder, sealed with compressed indium, a soft metal.

“When you smash it shut with the lid, that metal goes into all the cracks and spaces and makes an airtight, watertight seal,” Berilla tells the AP. The capsule will sit ten feet underground, covered with a half-ton stainless steel bell jar. “Philadelphia would have to be six feet underwater in order for this time capsule to even possibly take on water,” Berilla says. “And if Philly is six feet underwater, you’ve got way bigger problems in the world.”

This Independence Day, the capsule will be buried in Independence Mall in Philadelphia, steps from the room in which America’s founding fathers adopted the Declaration of Independence. A new sculpture will be installed to mark the capsule’s temporary grave: A large segmented snake, inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s 1754 “Join, or Die” woodcut.

The steel cylinder will join a long roster of time capsules buried in the U.S. Los Angeles buried one in 1976 containing a Cher dress, a Lakers jersey and other memorabilia. Seward, Nebraska, interred the “World’s Largest Time Capsule” in 1975, containing a Chevy Vega car and thousands of other items. In 1876, on the occasion of America’s 100th birthday, some citizens filled a “Century Safe” with signatures, portraits and a book on temperance—opened by President Gerald Ford 100 years later.

But what’s thought to be the oldest American time capsule was laid down by two American revolutionaries: Samuel Adams and Paul Revere. In 1795, they placed a brass box full of newspapers, 17th-century coins and the like beneath the cornerstone of the Massachusetts State House in Boston.

Berilla tells CBS News that when he thinks about the Americans of 250 years ago, he thinks of resilience. “And when I think forward to the future, I hope that's what they see from us,” he says. “That, yes, we had it hard compared to them, but more importantly, we were diverse. We were interesting. We were creative. We worked together.”

Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.