Union's 250th Birthday Time Capsule

Tolland, CT

This granite tribute honors William Chambers Shepard (1883–1958), a Connecticut advocate for the careful stewardship of the state's woodlands during an era when America was waking up to the cost of unchecked logging and land use. His generation embraced the Progressive-era conservation creed of 'wise use' — the idea that forests and natural resources should be managed for the long-term public good rather than exhausted for quick profit. Shepard helped advance that cause in Connecticut, including the founding of an organized council devoted to the state's natural resources.

Brookfield, MA

Brookfield is one of central Massachusetts's older communities, its roots reaching back to seventeenth-century colonial settlement, and like many New England towns it marked civic gratitude in stone and water. This fountain, dedicated in 1973 to Dr. Milman Pease, belongs to a long American tradition of honoring the beloved local physician — the figure who, in an age before modern hospitals dotted the countryside, delivered the babies, set the bones, and sat up through the fever nights of an entire town. A public fountain was a fitting tribute: a practical, everyday amenity that quietly kept a caregiver's name in daily community life.

Templeton, MA

In a New England mill village, a bridge was rarely just a river crossing — it was the thread that stitched a scattered community together. This stone span in Templeton carried townsfolk to the everyday engines of local life: a sawmill turning timber into boards, a grist mill grinding the neighborhood's grain, the meetinghouse where civic and religious life converged, and a district schoolhouse. The enumerated stops — from Wilkinson's to the curiously named 'Lead Pipe Man' — read like a directory of a self-sufficient early industrial hamlet, where water power and foot traffic set the rhythm of the day.

Providence, RI

In 1891, a handful of women began college-level study at Brown University at a time when most American universities still barred them from the classroom. Formally established as the Woman's College in Brown University in 1896, the school grew into a respected institution and was renamed Pembroke College in 1928, honoring an early benefactor's connection to Cambridge's Pembroke traditions. For decades it gave Rhode Island women a rigorous liberal-arts education alongside—yet separate from—the men of Brown, until the two coordinate colleges fully merged in 1971.