In late 2021, a team of conservators and archivists opened a copper “cornerstone” box that had been buried for 134 years beneath the (recently removed) statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond. Sue Donovan, Conservator for Special Collections at UVA Library, was one of the experts who opened the box and preserved the delicate items inside. Among the historians who later analyzed the artifacts, which included books, Confederate treasury notes, calling cards, and Masonic shrine pamphlets, was Ervin L. Jordan Jr., Associate Professor and Research Archivist in UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.
Donovan and Jordan are contributors to the new book, “The Buried Cause: Unearthing Hidden History in the Lee Monument Cornerstone,” published by University of Virginia Press earlier this year. Edited by state archaeologists at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources (DHR) and a curator at the Valentine Museum, the book is a collection of essays that investigate the items in the box, explore the histories of the people who donated the objects as well as those who opposed the statue in the first place, and deconstruct the Lost Cause mythology that originated immediately after the Civil War.
Expertise in conservation science and history
Donovan, trained in book conservation at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, was recruited for the cornerstone box opening by DHR because of her expertise in handling paper. Her essay, “How to Make a Time Capsule,” co-written with Katherine Ridgway, State Archaeological Conservator at DHR, carefully explains the issues conservators faced when opening and preserving the box. Donovan and Ridgway detail the agents of deterioration that damage buried containers, including physical forces, water, thieves and vandals, pests, and incorrect humidity, and outline ways to prevent these problems. The best way to prevent damage to a time capsule, they say, is to not bury it underground at all.
Jordan’s essay, “Mitchell’s Prophecy: Black Richmonders, the Lee Monument, and the Lost Cause Redux, 1890-2021” highlights John Mitchell Jr., a Black city council member, editor of the Richmond Planet newspaper, and former slave, who wrote that the Lee monument “bequeaths a legacy of treason and blood.” After Black laborers erected the Lee statue, Mitchell wrote in a June 1890 Richmond Planet editorial that “the Negro . . . put up the Lee Monument, and should the time come, will be there to take it down.” Mitchell’s prophecy came true: after national protests over the 2020 murder of George Floyd, Team Henry Enterprises, a Black-owned contracting firm, removed the Lee statue from Monument Avenue. It was ultimately donated to the Black History Museum & Cultural Center by the City of Richmond.
We spoke to Jordan and Donovan about their experience analyzing the contents of the Lee Monument cornerstone box as well as writing essays for “The Buried Cause.” An abbreviated version of our conversation is below.
Q. Sue, when dealing with a site as politically charged as the Lee Monument, how did the team balance the pressure for public transparency (for example, the livestreamed opening of the cornerstone box) with the slow, meticulous best practices of conservation science?
SD: In general, this is a hard balance to achieve. We would’ve preferred to be behind closed doors so we could hyper-focus on the items at hand and do what we were trained to do without an audience. But because of the high-profile situation, it just wasn’t an option. Kate (Ridgway, Archaeological Conservator of Virginia) did an impressive job of opening the box while communicating what was going on to the massive amount of press. I found it in myself to focus on what was in front of me and block everything else out. Luckily, we couldn’t see the comments on the livestream as we were actually doing the work, because there are still a lot of people who think the monuments should never have been taken down, and they put a lot of vitriol into the comments.
Q. Ervin, why was it important for your chapter to center John Mitchell’s voice, and why do you think his “prophecy” of the monument’s removal took over a century to be realized?
EJ: I centered Mitchell’s voice because he was both prophetic and profoundly influential. As a civil rights activist, city alderman, and editor of the Richmond Planet — one of the nation’s leading African American newspapers — he spoke boldly and publicly against white supremacy, lynchings, legalized segregation, and veneration of the Confederacy. His editorials reminded white Richmonders that Black citizens intended to exercise their civil rights and would not quietly accept second-class citizenship or the Lost Cause narrative. His prediction that the monument would one day fall took more than a century to be realized because legalized white supremacy was deeply entrenched and often violently defended. Hero worship of Confederate leaders was woven into the political and social order. Undoing that took generations.
Q. Sue, what is the status of cornerstone box items?
SD: The items in the boxes were determined to belong to the Library of Virginia, so the paper items are in their collection now, and they were recently on display at the Valentine Museum. Archaeological conservation requires a lot of time to bring items back to equilibrium after being underground for centuries or more, so the metallic objects were still in desiccant bags in the freezer the last time I visited DHR in October 2025.
Q. Sue, what was the most indispensable tool in your kit for this specific project?
SD: I used a lot of tools for this, and one of my favorites is a very smooth Teflon lifter. But I think the most indispensable part of the salvage was really the team of conservators and archivists there. Whenever I was done with my part of salvage, an archivist was there to label and cross-check against an inventory. It was invaluable to the process. And having Kate there, as well as other conservation professionals from a local institution and a textile conservator there to advise on textiles . . . just a really good team that worked together the best we could and as quickly as we could.
Q. Ervin, your essay features images of three items from the box (all of which reference Black Richmonders). Were you able to look at these items in person? If so, what was that experience like?
EJ: I was fortunate to examine copies of “History and Reminiscences of the Monumental Church” (1880), Chataigne’s Directory of Richmond, Va. (1885), and The Warrock‑Richardson Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina Almanack (1887). It was no surprise that these works reflected the racism of their era, portraying Black people as threats or social inferiors. Yet they also contain valuable clues about Black Richmond’s churches, neighborhoods, organizations, businesses, and individuals across social classes. After nearly 50 years as a historian, I’ve learned that even racist sources can yield important insights when carefully mined. They help us reconstruct a fuller, more accurate picture of African American life.
Q. Ervin, for students researching the Reconstruction era, why is it vital to study the resistance to monuments at the moment of their inception, rather than treating their removal today as a purely modern phenomenon?
EJ: Confederate monuments erected during the Lost Cause era (1870s–1920s) carried implicit and explicit racial messages. Those messages lived not only in granite, bronze and marble but in the hearts and minds of the people who erected them. Resistance against them at the time was real, but challengers were vastly outnumbered and often met with violent repression. A modern echo of that dynamic was the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Their removal today is not a spontaneous modern impulse — it is the culmination of changing attitudes, shifting demographics, and a long struggle against the racial climate that shaped their creation.
Q. Sue, what was the one item the team pulled out of the box that excited the room?
SD: There was a list of [box] contents available [from 1887], and most people were really excited about a picture of Abraham Lincoln in his casket. There was suspicion that it was a photograph, and if it were, then it would be very valuable in the historic context. Having already seen heavily damaged photographs in the cornerstone box underneath the At Ready statue in Albemarle County, I was convinced that even if the photograph were in there that it would be almost unsalvageable. It ended up being a two-page spread of an etching in Harper’s Weekly newspaper, which made more sense contextually (any photograph would have been too precious to put in the box and the newspaper etching would’ve been more accessible to more people at the time the cornerstone box was buried). But everyone kept asking if we had found the Lincoln photo yet, and it was fun to solve the mystery.
Q. Sue, in your essay, you state that conservators prefer for time capsules not to buried underground in the first place. Are there any examples of time capsules that were never buried but part of exhibitions instead, or hidden in climate-controlled spaces? How can this practice become more commonplace?
SD: Most recently, Kate worked with a Masonic chapter in the Richmond area to dedicate a time capsule, and she managed to convince them to keep it above ground! I think it’s hard to convince folks to not bury something, because it seems more permanent to them, or it feels more symbolic. We need more people reaching out for advice from conservators and other cultural heritage professionals, who I think would all say, “please don’t put anything underground,” but culturally, putting a time capsule in the ground is still what people think of first.
Q. A question for both of you: To the people in 1887, the cornerstone was a “sacred” relic. To the people in 2021, it was an archaeological site. Do you believe that by opening these boxes and analyzing them scientifically and critically, we have finally “disarmed” the monument’s original power?
EJ: America’s sanitized history has long obscured its most painful truths. As a scholar, I believe that documented facts can help build bridges across the racial divide. But we must confront the full story: 250 years of slavery, followed by a century of racial apartheid, and ongoing struggles despite nine Civil Rights Acts between 1866 and 1991. We have not yet fully reckoned with why raw racism persists. Opening the box was a step toward disarming the monument’s symbolic power, but the deeper work remains unfinished. We still need to confront the history we are not proud of.
SD: I don’t think it was ever purely an archaeological site. The work we did was archaeological because of the kind of damage we found, but it was and still is very charged, and there was no emotional distance like you might think of for archeological digs. After the killing of George Floyd, citizens of Richmond tagged and demonstrated in front of a monument that symbolized oppression and that had been traumatizing people for over a century. This started the process of taking it down that Devon Henry and his crew completed. Kate and I then further dismantled the monument by removing everything from the cornerstone box, and I’m grateful I had a role in it. There was really never a moment during the salvage that I wasn’t thinking about what this box meant and what the monument represented. I believe that removing the monument was a huge step in reducing the daily trauma felt in Richmond, but the historical trauma remains.
Q. Anything else either of you would like to add?
SD: I struggled for a long time with the dichotomy of having beliefs that are antithetical to everything that the monument and the contents of the box represented, yet participating in a very public role that could be misconstrued as endorsing the opposite. But I think I’m finding more peace with my role through the lens of having helped dismantle the monument, down past the foundation.
EJ: Forgive my concluding my comments with a pun. The “Buried Cause,”otherwise known as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, is buried but not entirely dead; its burial has always been symbolic rather than complete. It remains a powerful cultural force, shaping public memory, and proof that movements can sometimes win by losing, and need not be right to be honored. The Confederate South remains very much alive and venerated across the American landscape as street names, schools, statues, stamps, ships, and cemeteries. Confederate apologists conveniently reframed the Confederacy as a noble, tragic endeavor rather than a rebellion built on the preservation of slavery. Of Virginia’s 360 Confederate monuments, none denounces slavery.
Defending Confederate “heroes” and memorials is, by extension, defending slavery; defending slavery signifies, by extension, endorsing racism and white supremacy. Confederates are America’s only honored traitors. The “Buried Cause” may be buried, but it is not dead. Its monuments still stand; its falsehoods still circulate.
America celebrates its 250th birthday this year. As we enter our third century, history is watching. Talk is cheap; action matters. In 1904 W. E. B. Du Bois observed, “We often congratulate ourselves more on getting rid of a problem than on solving it . . . It behooves nations as well as men to do things at the very moment when they ought to be done.” That remains as true today as ever.
Note: Many of the images in this article were sourced from a 2022 DHR blog post by Jordan and a 2022 UVA Today interview with Donovan.