By RICK MILLER
Olean Star
GREAT VALLEY — The third annual Great Valley Town Picnic at Waugh Family Park Saturday included an invitation to former Youth Camp employees with plans to open a 30-year-old time capsule.
More than 15 former employees, including the director of the camp at the time the capsule was buried, attended the picnic along with nearly 150 town residents.
The time capsule, however, was nowhere to be found.
Supervisor Dan Brown guided the town’s efforts to develop the area that was donated by Mr. and Mrs. Travis Baugh after they purchased it from New York State. Most of the buildings including classrooms, offices and dormitories were leveled.
Brown also led the efforts to retrieve the time capsule, buried in 1995. Among the items it contained were a staff photo album, Burger King utensils, a Pepsi bottle, watch, basketball and football cards, pens, pencils and crayons, a model car, stamps, light bulbs and men’s cologne.
“We can’t find it,” Brown told the Olean Star. The time capsule is missing.
Brown and others, armed with a metal detector and some witching sticks, along with the coordinates of the time capsule, searched unsuccessfully for what was described as a galvanized garbage can.
“On employee said he had coordinates that placed it near the camp flagpole,” Brown said. The flagpole sits next to a commemorative boulder with a plaque on it.
Neither the metal detector or the sticks Brown used to check for anomalies beneath the soil found the time capsule.
One of the former Youth Camp employees believes the time capsule may have accidentally been dug up when bulldozers leveled the site.
Brown said after most of the buildings were leveled, they were bulldozed into a large hole dug for that purpose.
Brown also met with Gary Almond, who was director at the time the time capsule was buried and believes they may have been looking in the wrong area.
“He said he thinks it was on this end of the (classroom) building, not by the flagpole,” Brown said.
Former Youth Camp employees Bonnie Cummings, Bob Reynolds and Pati Gilfillan Andrews were talking inside a newly renovated building that once served as the reading and math classrooms. A display of photos and other youth camp materials was featured inside.
Those attending were treated to plates of pulled pork sandwiches and corn on the cob.
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