Evergreen Reopens Its 1976 Time Capsule This Friday, 50 Years to the Day

July 31, 1976. America is turning 200, and somebody in Evergreen decides the moment is worth saving. So they put it in a box and put the box in the ground at Hiwan Heritage Park.

Fifty years later to the day, that box comes back up.

Here is the part people miss about time capsules. Most of them get forgotten. Somebody buries one, the plaque wears off, the paperwork disappears, and forty years later a construction crew finds a rusted tin and nobody knows what they are looking at. This one did not get forgotten. Jefferson County Parks and Open Space knows exactly where it is, exactly when it went under, and they are opening it Friday, July 31, 2026, from 3 to 5 p.m. at Hiwan Heritage Park and Museum, 28473 Meadow Drive.

Free. Bring yourself. That is the whole ask.

And then the next day, they do the reverse. Saturday, Aug. 1, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., they bury a brand new one. New notes, new reminders, new little pieces of what 2026 Evergreen wants somebody in the future to see. The whole two-day thing is called "Our Time/Our Story," and both events have 1970s refreshments, which honestly is the detail that got me. Somebody is going to be handing out food themed to the decade that gave us the fondue pot. I respect it.

Why Hiwan is the right place to bury a memory

Here is the thing. You do not just pick a random hillside for this. You pick the spot that already is a time capsule, and Hiwan qualifies.

The story starts in 1893. Dr. Mary Josepha Williams Douglas, who everyone called Jo, and her mother, Mary Neosho Bailey Williams, bought land in Evergreen for a summer retreat. They named it Camp Neosho. And Jo was not just some wealthy woman with a mountain hobby. She was one of Colorado's earliest female physicians, graduated from Gross Medical College in Denver in 1889. Think about what that took in 1889. A woman getting a medical degree, practicing, and then buying up mountain land under her own name. That is the real story on Hiwan and most people walk past it.

The building itself is the work of one man, mostly. Evergreen craftsman John Spence, known as Jock, hand-built the lodge out of local materials. And he kept building. By 1918 it was 25 rooms with two octagonal towers and a chapel he finished that same year. Twenty-five rooms of hand craftsmanship in the mountains. That is not a house, that is a life's work.

Then the place changes hands and changes jobs. After 1938 the Buchanan family took over and turned it into Hiwan Ranch, a working Hereford cattle operation. And these people were serious about cattle. At one point they dropped $61,000 on a single bull. A record purchase. Sixty-one grand on one animal, and remember that is not 2026 dollars, that is mid-century dollars. That was a house. That was several houses.

How it almost got knocked down

So how does a 25-room hand-built lodge survive into the present when Colorado has a long habit of bulldozing its own history?

Barely, is the answer.

Hiwan was facing demolition. The thing that saved it was the Jefferson County Historical Society teaming up with the newly formed Jeffco Open Space to get it listed on the National Register of Historic Places. They opened it as a museum in 1974. So the museum was two years old when that 1976 capsule went into the ground, which puts it in a different light for me. This was a community that had just fought to keep its history and was feeling pretty good about the next 200 years. You bury a time capsule when you believe there is going to be a future that cares. That is an optimistic act.

And the people running the memory side of this are still at it. The Evergreen Mountain Area Historical Society, founded in 1973, sponsors the museum's exhibits. They are sitting on more than 6,000 photographs and 48 recorded oral-history interviews. Forty-eight actual voices of people describing what this place was. That collection is the reason anybody knows any of this.

What you actually get to see Friday

Here is what makes this one different from a normal museum afternoon. You are not looking at a finished display behind glass. You are watching staff open the box and catalog every object into the museum's collections in real time. The dirt-to-database part. Most people never see that. You get to stand there while a fifty-year-old artifact becomes an official piece of the record.

I do not know what is in the box. Neither does anybody who is not on the county staff, and that is the fun of it. Somebody in 1976 made a bet about what mattered. Friday we find out what they picked.

Quick real estate side note, because I cannot help it. Evergreen property near a National Register landmark with 130-plus years of continuous story behind it does not exactly hurt values, and Meadow Drive sits right in the heart of it. But that is a different article.

For now, mark it. Friday, July 31, 3 to 5 p.m. for the dig-up. Saturday, Aug. 1, 11 to 2 for the reburial. Both free. Go watch Evergreen talk to the future.