The cornerstone from the old Elks Lodge is almost not noticeable in the parking lot behind the Greenville History Museum.
While it’s a large white hunk of granite and concrete, it’s mostly non-descript.
A member of the Greenville Historical commission, Camille Collins; a downtown business owner, Evelyn Brown; and museum director, Benjy Nelken, grabbed the cornerstone from the rubble of the condemned and razed building the day after it was knocked down.
Nelken, with help from Charles Lesure’s back hoe and trailer, moved the block to the parking lot behind his office.
It sat there for a few days before Nelken began working to clean it. It’s then when he noticed there was a sealed pocket in the top of the stone.
“That looks like a time capsule,” Nelken said.
And he was right.
He grabbed a friend, Warren Hammet, who brought a grinder over to free the contents of the sealed pocket.
In the pocket was a copper box.
In the box were two newspapers, a couple listings of Elks Club membership, a few corroded coins and three bones.
At the time, there was much pomp and circumstance surrounding the construction of the Elks building.
In the Saturday, April 14, 1906, Greenville Times, one of the two competing newspapers in Greenville, published a story about a parade to lay the cornerstone and a letter from the Elks Club membership on the front page of the paper.
The story, with no sense of hyperbole, said there were 100,000 people expected to attend the parade on Thursday, April 19, 1906.
The parade would start at the hall on Washington, turn down Walnut Avenue to Main Street, then left on to Poplar Avenue and ending back on Washington Avenue at the Elks building.
The parade seems to be a tableau of the cotton pickers of the area. The language is undoubtedly not politically correct and somewhat confusing. The best explanation seems to be that a large number of the black population of the area will be paraded in front of the parade crowd in a number of supposed entertaining stories.
The chairman of the parade committee, C. A. Kinkead, wrote a letter to the mayor and city marshal, published in the newspaper.
The letter states: “As chairman of the parade committee for the big Elks’ street parade next Thursday, I humbly petition your honor to protect the people of the city by roping each side of the streets; stopping all traffic during the parade, and, if necessary, detail one thousand policemen to protect the one hundred thousand who will be there to witness it.”
The story and letter are followed by a listing of the officers of the club.
Sadly, the next week’s newspaper is not included in the bound volumes of that year’s edition and the entire six months of the year including April are missing for the weekly Democrat.
Nelken said local craftsman Euphus Ruth has been employed to further conserve the cornerstone.
The contents of the time capsule, which would have most likely been placed at the end of the parade, are in the Greenville History Museum.
The City of Greenville was granted a permit to demolish the former Elks Lodge in February 2019. It sat for another year, before a tornado ripped through downtown in January 2020.
City officials determined, at the time, enough damage had been caused to the building to necessitate its destruction.
Crews acted fast to pull the building down.
The building, unused for decades, was most recently the property of MACE before being deeded to the City of Greenville.
