When Woodward Avenue Elementary School in DeLand celebrates their 50th anniversary, there will be no time capsule to open up.
They made one that first year, of course. It's just that now no one knows exactly where it is.
- Woodward Ave. Elementary in Volusia County is celebrating 50 years
- The anniversay event won't be quite the same without the time capsule
- School officials still have a few days to track down the decades old treasure
Gina Moreland’s schoolwork may be inside that missing capsule. The 55-year-old has lived in a home right across the street from Woodward Avenue Elementary most of her life, and spent many years at the school.
“They didn’t have a cafeteria at that time, so we brought our lunch and I got to come home,” said Moreland.
Moreland and her fellow students worked on items placed into the school's time capsule as part of one of her class projects
“They buried it about a foot off of the flagpole," said Woodland Elementary School Principal Kate Godbee. "We have picture clipping, newspaper clippings of them burying it about a foot off the flag pole.”
School staff dug underneath a slab near the flag pole. Then, they dug under the flag pole.
They even borrowed a metal detector to find the capsule. So far, however, they have come up empty handed.
One theory is that because the time capsule was made out of plastic, with only a few metal screws, the metal detectors weren’t able to pick it up.
After the metal detector failed, they tried using sonar, too.
“We looked everywhere here for it and we cannot find it anywhere,” said Godbee.
Moreland has seen this school grow, and believes construction crews may have laid concrete over it.
“They put so much effort into doing it so it could be brought out at the 50th, and now they have no clue where it is,” said Moreland.
The 50th anniversary celebration is next Thursday, which gives school officials several days to find the time capsule.