Cornerstone of the Williamson County Science Building
Time Keeps on Slipping Into the Future
by James Foreman
If you wanted a stranger or group of strangers to know who you were, what you valued, what you were proud of, and what was distinctive about you, how would you convey that with material objects? These physical objects would be tokens, artifacts, and symbolic representatives of your identity. They would also say something about other people in your life, your society, your culture. Let’s also place further constraints by restricting the number of objects, the size of space allotted to store them, and materials that will endure over time. How long would it be before these items would be exposed to examination by a future audience? Could you control the amount of time that would elapse before the opening and study of these relics? These are the kind of questions that challenged people who wanted to leave a reminder of who they were to a future generation. Cornerstones and time capsules are deliberate efforts and attempts to communicate through physical objects with the future by people who desired to make their presence known to future strangers. The cornerstone of the Williamson County Science Building was set in 1916 and opened at a demolition ceremony in 1951. The Williamson County Science Building cornerstone contents will help us answer the questions that we asked at the beginning of this paragraph.
The story of cornerstones goes back to the foundation of civilization, the beginning of cities, and the buildings they erected. We are restricted to the archaeological record for this part of the history of cornerstones. Thanks to the arid climate of the Middle East and Egypt, we have some of the oldest artifacts in existence. The traditional idea of a cornerstone is the first stone laid for a building. While the tradition continues today, however, because of new building materials, the cornerstone is rarely a stone, and when in the process, the installation will also vary. These cornerstones have served various cultural functions over the millennia, from orientation to a particular point deemed auspicious for a society to dedication rites that may have involved human sacrifices in earlier times. “Foundation deposits,” or hollowed-out stones filled with small vessels, animal deposits, and other symbolic items, were standard in constructing temples, palaces, tombs, and forts. Cornerstones have been excavated from ancient Mesopotamia and Egyptian archaeological sites revealing information about the societies that deemed these cultural deposits worthy of remembrance. As the practice of installing cornerstones evolved, their presence became more prominent, and they were placed above ground and began a migration closer to the building’s entrance. Often displaying an inscription, their visibility took on added importance, and they are now usually found on interior walls. Cornerstones had served various purposes to preserve time, indicating exactly when they were built. They have also served as markers of prosperity where builders want to enhance their prestige. Most archaeological evidence presents both political and religious significance to their existence. It is often used to honor the architects and people responsible for the building project.
William E. Jarvis expands the study of the cornerstone to include more than just architectural features by rebranding them as time capsules. Jarvis begins with the Oxford English Dictionary definition of time capsules: “a container used to store for posterity a selection of objects thought to be representative of life at a particular time” (OED 1989). This idea of representation would easily qualify the cornerstone of the Williamson County Science Building more accurately as a time capsule. One of the most distinct differences between the cornerstone and the time capsule is that the time capsule typically has an end date, a time designated to be reopened. This is the case in some but not all cornerstones. Many cornerstones were not accessed until the building was demolished, which was the case with the Williamson County Science Building. Yet, their similarities lie with their intention. They are cultural representations of relics deemed necessary by those who commissioned them. This designated targeted date is the essence of the time capsule. “The Century Safe” was the first modern deliberately deposited, target–dated time capsule exhibited at the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The cornerstone of the Williamson County Science Building contains an assortment of printed materials. There is the Megaphone, the weekly newsletter of Southwestern University, and a variety of other local newspapers such as the Williamson County Sun. There is also a copy of The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments, The 1914 Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which is an instruction manual for clergy, and The Methodist Hymnal. The presence of these three religious texts reminds us that Southwestern University was founded in 1840 as a Methodist university. Their placement within the cornerstone emphasizes this point and tells us the importance of religious faith to the people who selected these items for posterity. It is also worth noting that there was no science textbook or other reference to science in general.
I will focus on The Holy Bible to show that this text represents the science of that culture. Yet, this view of science is not the conventional stereotype as a set of laboratory experiments carried out by a few great men of science but as the best that can be represented as the pinnacle of our current knowledge. How do the relics in the cornerstone of the Williamson County Science Building help us understand science as a cultural phenomenon? Science is derived from Latin and means knowledge. Today our definition of science may align with Bacon’s ‘scientific method,’ where there is a reliance on observation and testing, but that is a reductionist view of science. If we expand it to the pursuit of knowledge, subjects like philosophy, religion, and alternative methodologies can be explored. In 1916 the world was in the second year of the Great War, atrocities were reported from Belgium, submarines were sinking passenger ships such as the Lusitania, and chemical warfare was introduced. Was science, the pursuit of knowledge, best represented by the technologies of war, or did the people who placed the artifacts into the cornerstone of the Williamson County Science Building adhere to a different definition of knowledge and, therefore, science? They would also have been aware of the cultural debates that were taking place in classrooms across the U.S. regarding the teaching of evolution in public schools. Less than a decade after the placement of the cornerstone the neighboring state of Tennessee would past the Butler Act prohibiting public schools from denying the Biblical account of mankind’s origin, which in 1925 would lead to the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. The students and faculty at Southwestern University would have been part of this conversation regarding the role of religion in education. The placement of religious texts into the cornerstone might have been a show of support for their Methodist tradition.
Our more secular understanding of science may seem strange to include a religious text as a representative object. Still, from the perspective of the people choosing the items to fit in the cornerstone, it may have been perfectly understandable and logical. For example, The Holy Bible was a printed work. We often associate the Bible with early printing because of Guttenberg and other printers. From bibles to hymnals, religious documents were some of the earliest printed copies. Printing was also one of the significant developments in the evolution of science. Printing allowed writers to pass on ideas and help perpetuate the scientific revolution.
The cornerstone of the Williamson County Science Building represents the cornerstones and time capsules that have been used throughout history. Moreover, the placement of The Holy Bible is representative of the types of artifacts deposited into these chronological containers, and it is also symbolic of science as the study of knowledge. Southwestern University is a Methodist religious institution, and this sacred text represents its pinnacle of knowledge, its highest ideal. Science, the research and the pursuit of knowledge, is a cultural discipline practiced in various ways. Our understanding of what represents knowledge is subject to the culture in which it originates, and it is unique. While our modern ideas of laboratories and German-speaking men in white coats may be a popular stereotype, it misrepresents science as the complex study of the world and different societies and cultures that seek to understand the universe we inhabit.