Capitol finds: Renovators find debris, beer cans, tools, checks

While demolishing walls at the state Capitol during recent months, construction crews have found dozens of interesting artifacts hidden safely inside wall caches.

From beer cans to structural debris to an old dead rat, workers have been piecing together the random items, trying to glean historical wisdom. Several of the pieces may allow historical architects such as Charles Shepherd of the Capitol Restoration Group, to re-create some of the original designs found in the building.

The Capitol is undergoing a four-year, $200 million renovation, to be completed around 2008, to make it earthquake safe. Many of the building's walls feature an outer layer of granite, a layer of brick, a void cavity, a hollow clay tile then a plaster material.

The Capitol has been undergoing heavy demolition work and many of the stones on the lower level have been removed to place base isolators and sliders inside that will support the building's structural columns.

While digging around the sides of the Capitol building, workers found chunks of plaster and partial designs mixed into the dirt.

"I think it was just broken parts that they started making and they broke, so they tossed them out," Shepherd said.

But those tossed-out pieces of rubble have allowed Shepherd to work with real-life objects while designing new architecture pieces, rather than just using photographs of the original designs.

"As a historical architect, he's (Shepherd's) able to re-create and put this back in the drawing so we can go back as correctly as possible," said Allyson Gamble, spokeswoman for the Utah State Capitol Preservation Board, which is overseeing the retrofitting project.

One worker found "Mr. Skippy," a dead rat, curled up next to a heating pipe behind a wall. Now it's being stored in a clear, plastic jar along with the other artifacts in the Jacobson-Hunt construction trailer on the east side of the Capitol building. The collection includes a few Fisher beer cans, whiskey bottles, a J.G. McDonalds Chocolate Co. wrapper, a Union Portland Cement Co. Devil's Slide bag, leftover tools, light fixtures, pieces of crowning, flooring, molding and more.

It is still unclear how old some of the pieces are. Construction on the building began in December 1912, but several renovation projects have been completed since then.

Masons recently taking apart terra cotta detailing elements on the outside of the Capitol's dome found an old pair of brown leather shoes stuffed inside a cubic part of the balustrade (railing). The shoes, which date from 1912 or 1914, were wrapped in an Auerbach's department store ad.