A Century on Campus: Hopkins School Opens a 100-Year Old Time Capsule

On a bright spring afternoon, the Hopkins School community gathered at the base of Baldwin Hall to mark a once-in-a-century occasion: the opening of a time capsule placed on the Hopkins campus 100 years ago, on April 25, 1925. The ceremony, held exactly a century later on Friday, April 25, 2025, honored the foresight of past School leaders and celebrated the enduring spirit of Hopkins.

The original time capsule was sealed into the cornerstone of Baldwin Hall—the first building constructed on Hopkins’ Westville campus when the School made its current location its home. It had been placed there during a formal cornerstone-laying ceremony led by trustees, students, and families. In preparation for the 100-year anniversary ceremony, stone masons spent eight hours the day before carefully extracting the capsule from the massive granite block, using traditional hammer and chisel techniques.

The Time Capsule Reveal Ceremony featured 1920s-era music, refreshments, and remarks from Head of School Matt Glendinning, longtime faculty member and alumnus Scott Wich ‘89, and the stone mason who led the extraction. 

Wich, delivering words written by School Archivist Thom Peters, provided a stirring account of the 1925 ceremony. He described the gathering of trustees, which included Governor Simeon Baldwin, who served as a Hopkins Trustee for more than 50 years and gave the building its name. Wich honored the moment as “the centennial of Hopkins becoming a true country day school on this glorious campus, on this glorious day.”

The actual reveal was led by student historians Theo F. ’25 and Elona S. ’26, editors of the student-run Hopkins History Journal. They removed the capsule’s metal box and read aloud its contents, which included a Hopkins course guide from 1925, a city newspaper, a telephone almanac, a Yale alumni magazine, and various documents chronicling New Haven’s civic and cultural life in the Roaring Twenties.

Among the more memorable items was a literary magazine from the time that shared witty anecdotes about students, a farm history book recounting the land’s past before it became part of the Hopkins campus, and fundraising literature from the School’s early campaign for Baldwin Hall. 

In a moment of full-circle reflection, Glendinning closed the event by announcing that a new time capsule will soon be buried in conjunction with the construction of the School’s new Academic and Performing Arts Center. The capsule will be opened by the Class of 2025 at their 50th reunion. “We’re preserving the past, but we’re also thinking about our future,” he said.

Watch the full ceremony below, and see more photos of the event in the gallery below the video.