Nearly 50 years after helping bury a time capsule on the Ray County Courthouse lawn, members of the Richmond High School Class of 1976 received approval to open it during their upcoming class reunion.

The Ray County Commission unanimously approved a request from class members Sandra Hendrix Austin and Jane Weisz to open the courthouse lawn time capsule ahead of the class’s upcoming 50-year reunion. The class plans to display the contents during the reunion before returning them to the capsule and adding new items from the Richmond High School Class of 2026.

Austin explained the idea came about while members of the Class of 1976 were planning their upcoming 50-year reunion and wondered whether they could open the time capsule before the original 100-year timeline.

“In another 50 years, we’ll all be dead,” she said. “Nobody else is going to care what we put in the time capsule, so we thought it would be nice if we could open it for our class reunion, which is just in a couple of weeks. We t…