CUMBERLAND — During the city’s bicentennial celebration in 1955, the Rosenbaum family decided to bury a time capsule at Constitution Park.
Lydia Goldblatt, whose maiden name is Rosenbaum, was 7 years old at the time.
She looked up to her grandmother Esther Rosenbaum in fear.
“You’re not going to bury me, right?” Goldblatt asked her.
After reassuring Goldblatt of her safety, the Rosenbaums buried the capsule.
Almost 70 years later, descendants from New York, Chicago, Baltimore and Boston returned to the park to open the capsule.
The process of unearthing and opening the time capsule on Friday’s rainy afternoon unexpectedly took about four hours.
“The Rosenbaums never did anything halfway,” Brendon Kingston, a descendant of the Rosenbaums, said.
After one front-end loader blew a gasket, the city streets department brought in another. Having unveiled a giant block of concrete, the city brought in a jackhammer to break through, revealing a large cylindrical metal tube.
After a few attempts to saw through the metal, which revealed another metal tube, the streets department took the capsule to its workshop to torch it open.
After about an hour, the workers returned with a hefty metal time capsule, and Carrie Parker, a descendent of the Rosenbaums, opened it to reveal a thick layer of wax.
After some scraping, the family found a single roll of microfilm, and while members of the family had no immediate access to a film reader, they became a step closer to viewing the Queen City as their relatives once did.
“It’ll be interesting to see what, what all you know, what all comes out,” said Ricky Krall, who also saw her family bury the capsule as a child.
The Rosenbaum family owned and operated Rosenbaum Brothers Department Store at 118 Baltimore St. between 1899 and 1971.
The department store was one defining factor of what made Cumberland special, being that the store once employed as many as 200 employees, Goldblatt said.
“Cumberland was such a booming town,” Carrie Parker, another direct descendant of the Rosenbaums, said.
Krall said she sees a lot of people sharing positive memories of Cumberland at that time with the family store at the center of many stories.
“It’s really warming to my heart, because it just makes you feel good that people felt that way, that it was an establishment that had been there with something special,” Krall said.
That something special has been something the city has been trying to recreate through the revitalization of downtown.
Part of that revitalization included the old department store. Now called The Rosenbaum, the building is a mixed-use space with shops and apartments.
Getting a peek at the old Queen City is a bit serendipitous, Mayor Ray Morriss said.
“It fits in with, we know, with the renovations of the Rosenbaum building and everything that’s going on downtown,” Morriss said.
Morriss and Councilman Rock Cioni were considering placing a new time capsule.
“Now that this one’s coming out, maybe we need to put one in,” Morriss said. “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea, but you’ll have to make sure we’re giving them opening instructions.”