Engineers' Club Time Capsule

The Millennium Hotel building in Downtown St. Louis is up for demolition to make way for a new, modern development currently on track by developer The Cordish Companies. The community is excited for a new look to Downtown that will greet visitors from points around the world as they explore our City. 

Did you know the Engineers' Club of St. Louis was founded on the site of the Millennium Hotel? Thirteen engineers of the community gathered at a building on that site on December 2, 1868, and established the Engineers' Club of St. Louis. The building on the site in 1868 was a water service building. 

Fast forward 100 years to 1968, a year of celebration for the Club. Rightfully so! A Centennial Celebration Committee, chaired by General Leif J. Sverdrup, was established for organizing events and publications associated with the celebration; and to collect memorabilia and create a centennial plaque. On November 14, 1968, the Club held a Centennial Celebration event at the Chase Park Plaza, where the gathering of over 1,100 engineers and their guests was thought at the time to be the largest engineering gathering in the history of the state. Mayor Alfonso J. Cervantes declared November 14 Engineers Day for the City of St. Louis. 
On a blustery December 2, 1968, members of the Engineers' Club and community leaders met on the construction site for the Millennium Hotel St. Louis, which was constructed as the Stouffer's Riverfront Inn, to dedicate a bronze plaque to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the Club. The plaque was to be set in its permanent place when the landscaping for the Stouffer's Riverfront Inn was completed. 

Meanwhile, the Centennial Celebration Committee sold centennial desktop replicas of the Jefferson Expansion to Westward Expansion, i.e., the Arch, for $10 each. More notably, the Committee collected engineering memorabilia from the previous 100 years to be interred in a time capsule in the foundation of the centennial plaque. The time capsule was encased in the foundation on April 2, 1969, by G. L. Tarlton Contracting Company, in a titanium container donated by Nooter Corporation. 
On May 22, 1969, the Engineers' Club held its annual meeting at the completed Stouffer's Riverfront Inn. Members and guests observed and celebrated the completed centennial plaque and foundation. 

A quote from the May 1969 Journal of the Engineers' Club of St. Louis, from Past-President Conway Briscoe's address at the Annual Dinner, "The "time capsule" just referred to, will be disinterred (we hopefully expect) on December 2, 2068, the 200th year of our founding, so that engineers of that day will know what engineers of the previous century were doing. I say, "hopefully," this being based, as Louis Sachs points out, on there being engineers on earth 100 years from now and their ability to understand the English language."

I hope you can agree that the history and the heritage of the Engineers' Club of St. Louis is robust and far-reaching. The Club was the cutting edge for engineering, construction, manufacturing, and technological advancements through publications such as the Journal of the Engineers' Club of St. Louis. To think, the 200th Anniversary is just a few, short forty-three years away, and the opening of the time capsule could be within the lives of today's members. Think about what engineering will be like 43 years from now compared to before 1968! 
Join me in celebrating the history of the Club and looking forward to the next 100 years.

Tony Roth, P.E.