1975 Chevrolet Vega Emerges from ‘World’s Largest Time Capsule’ After 50 Years
Lead image credit: KLKNTV
Fifty years ago, while some crazy Canucks were starting a new classified magazine that would someday become the website you’re reading today, an eccentric man in Seward, Nebraska, was getting ready to bury 5,000 items (including a brand-spanking-new Chevrolet Vega) and creating what would briefly be the world’s largest time capsule.
The 1975 Vega (along with all the other items) was buried on the fourth of July that same year and was exhumed almost exactly 50 years later, just a few weeks before July 4, 2025. The car was entombed alongside a collection of other wild items, including a Kawasaki motorcycle, a leisure suit, photos, and letters, and all of it emerged in relatively good (though not perfect) condition. Indeed, some letters were damaged over the course of the last half-century and some rust formed on the hood of the yellow Vega, but based on photos of the event, the car appears to be in surprisingly good condition.
And the word surprising is appropriate. Just last year, the residents of Seward cracked into an upper chamber of the time capsule (a later addition), to reveal a 1983 Toyota Corolla that was much rustier.
That upper chamber was added a few years after the lower chamber that contained the Vega in order to earn the capsule bragging rights. The 45-ton concrete section that contained the Chevy was buried in 1975 and was placed in the front yard of a business that belonged to Keith Davisson, reports Atlas Obscura. At the time, it earned the title of largest time capsule in the world from Guinness.
However, Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, protested, claiming that it had the largest capsule in the world. To win back his title, Davisson added an antechamber to his vault that took the shape, appropriately enough, of a pyramid. However, the dispute caused enough uncertainty to strip either location of the official title, which today belongs to a 200 cubic metre vault in Guildford in the United Kingdom, which was locked in 2000 and also contains a car, a Mini, according to Guinness.
Whichever pre-millennium capsule was biggest, Davisson’s Vega-housing vault was massive enough that the town of Seward didn’t really know how to open it. That’s why it took the decision to open the first half in 2024, and to use what it had learned to open the older section this summer.
Sadly, Keith Davisson passed away in 1999, meaning that he didn’t get the chance to witness everything that emerged from it. However, his daughter Trish Johnson was on hand to witness her father’s work come to fruition. She was among the people who helped remove all the objects from the vault and put them in a warehouse to display to everyone in town on July 4, in time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its burial.
