Every State's 'America 250' Time Capsule Contributions, Ranked
A time capsule to celebrate America’s Semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding, was recently sealed and will be buried at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia on July 4, 2026. All 50 states, Washington, D.C., and five U.S. territories contributed their own items to the time capsule.
The 900-pound time capsule will be reopened in 2276, long after everyone reading this has died. But you don’t have to wait that long to know what’s inside. Some states contributed really interesting items, while others really dropped the ball. So it feels appropriate to break down each state’s contributions in America’s greatest journalistic form: the numbered list.
Each state and territory’s contributions run the gamut from what makes a good time capsule to precisely what makes a boring time capsule. California, which we ranked as the best, has some of the coolest contributions to the project. They included a fusion superconductor from General Atomics, a photo of California taken by NASA from space, and a prediction for the year 2276 by Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot. No matter what you think of AI, the people of 2276 will probably get a kick out of our stupid little robot predictions.
Among Nevada’s contributions (ranked 9th) is poker chips, which makes sense given the state’s gambling history. And Ohio (4th) had a solid, if admittedly geographically confused, contribution, which includes fabric from the 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, by the Wright Brothers.
Another state that understood how to deliver on this whole time capsule thing is New Mexico (2nd), which contributed a wide variety of items symbolic of the state, including a bolo tie, tile hand-crafted by a Mexican-American artist, Native American jewelry, and sand from White Sands National Park.
Utah (3rd) also included a large number of items that were unique, including a stock certificate for The Red Warrior Mining Company and George Washington Lord’s Prayer gold medal, handed out in 1869 after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in Promontory Summit, Utah.
Kansas is the worst state on the list, since it decided to include little more than a one-page document listing names of the commissioners who organized the 250th celebrations. But there are other terrible choices, like the great state of Maryland, which we ranked at 46th because it chose a challenge coin and the text of an executive order.
Connecticut (51st), Kansas (56th), and Indiana (55th) are the perfect examples of what not to include in a time capsule. Their contributions amounted to some of the planning documents for the 250th celebration. Nobody cares, here or in the future, what people sitting on a planning commission said in a bunch of stuffy meetings. Selecting those kinds of documents is always the laziest option. We’ll call it time-capsule slop.
Most time capsules are incredibly boring. It’s common for people to include things like flags, coins, and Bibles, along with newspaper clippings. But every once in a while, a really interesting time capsule gets unearthed, whether it’s a mouse used by Steve Jobs (buried in 1983, unearthed in 2013) or a cryotron and a vial of penicillin (buried in 1957 and unearthed in 2015).
But burying things underground is literally one of the worst ways to preserve things for the future. There have been plenty of time capsules that turn into nothing more than a soggy mess of garbage. That’s why the people who assembled this time capsule have built it to stay dry for centuries.
The list below features descriptions of each state and territory’s contributions provided by America 250. There are other contributions to the time capsule from partner organizations like the Smithsonian, the NFL, and the Supreme Court. But the list below is just ranking what came from the states. The other junk inside will have to wait for another list.
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