On December 3, 2020, Helen Mann of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's As It Happens radio program interviewed Howard Kroplick on the "Messages in a Bottle" discovery at the Roslyn Grist Mill. The above six-minute news segment was broadcasted throughout Canada and NPR radio stations in North America.
Guest: Howard Kroplick
TALIA SCHLANGER: Recently, in a village on Long Island, a little bit of history repeated. Some workers were restoring an 18th-century grist mill in Roslyn, New York. And they found something left behind. It was a bottle, tucked away under the floor, by men who worked on the building a century ago. Howard Kroplick is the head of the Roslyn Landmark Society.
HELEN MANN: Mr. Kroplick, what did you find inside this old milk bottle?
HOWARD KROPLICK: Well, we found an amazing discovery. Construction workers who are restoring a 1700s gristmill found messages in a bottle that was left by construction workers who were restoring it 103 years ago.
HM: One of the letters is in Italian, the other in English. The handwriting in the Italian one is particularly beautiful. Who wrote it, and what does it say?
HK: Yes, the Italian letter was written by a mason named Romolo Caparrelli, and he was the person responsible for putting the concrete floor in the gristmill when it was being restored. And also, he did special concrete planking on the outside of the building to make the concrete look like wood. And we were able to translate that. I have a friend who is a professor of Italian culture at a nearby university, and he translated the letter, which basically said, I am Romolo Caparrelli. I invented this new form of concrete planking. Please remember me. And we do remember him 103 years later.
HM: because of this note that he left in this does bottle. It's quite tender, actually, to think that he wanted to be remembered. And now we have this from him.
HK: Yes. Yes. And we actually knew about him because he also left his initials on the outside of the building in the concrete, the RC. So we were investigating a couple of months ago who the RC could be? And we found in our archives of note that it was Romolo Caparrelli, and he was a native of the village and worked on a lot of different concrete buildings in the area, including his own home.
HM: And he was clearly a very talented craftsman, given what you’re describing.
HK: He was a very talented craftsman. And he worked on the churches that are still standing in the village today.
HM: Does he have descendants in the area?
HK: He has a descendant in South Carolina, who I was in communications with a couple of months ago when I was doing some research on the initials. And when I informed her about that we found the letter and the bottles. She was so excited because it was a family folklore that Romolo had left something in the gristmill. And she said, wow, 103 years later, it was discovered.
HM: Wow, that's pretty extraordinary. What about the English letter writer? What did he have to say?
HK: Yes, the English letter was written by Stephen Speedling, who was 81 years old at the time, and he was a carpenter again in the village. He had a carpentry shop right across from the gristmill. And the building actually still stands today. And in his letter, he wrote a brief history of the work that he and Romolo were doing, including a listing of all the people who worked on the gristmill. And he noted that they were hired by Harold Godwin, who is the grandson of the poet and civic leader William Cullen Bryant.
HM: So there are notable figures that are attached to the mill.
HK: There are definitely notable figures who attached with it. And in addition to the two messages, they left four coins in there, in the bottle, as well. A silver war token, some Indian head pennies and an 1863 Haitian coin.
HM: I don't want to be crass, but are the coins worth anything?
HK: I wish they were because that would have helped pay for the restoration. But, unfortunately, they're not.
HM: [chuckling] And you say that Mr. Speedling was 81 in 1917.
HK: He was 81 years old, and some of his buildings still exist in the village. And like I said, his carpentry shop is still standing right on Old Northern Boulevard, right across from the gristmill.
HM: Wow. What kind of condition was the bottle and were the letters in?
HK: You know, amazingly, they were in pretty good shape. They were encased in the concrete slab that was used for the first floor of the building. And nobody had ever noticed them before. But we were removing the concrete as part of our restoration process. And a worker suddenly came across the bottle, and there they were. And what was amazing was the day before, I happened to take a picture of that section of the gristmill and the concrete slab and never realized there was a bottle there until the next day, and sure enough, I have a picture of the bottle in the concrete slab.
HM: I read that that the gristmill even has an association with George Washington. Did he sleep there?
HK: No, he didn't sleep there, but he had breakfast with the owner of the gristmill back in 1790. And most likely, he did a visit to the gristmill as well.
HM: What are you going to do with the items then?
HK: We're going to preserve the items. And then when we turn the building into an educational center, they're going to be on prominent display.
HM: How long do you think it'll be before the building is ready?
HK: Well, we're hoping within two years.
HM: Wow. Well, that's very exciting to hear. Thank you very much for sharing the story.
HK: Oh, it's great talking to you.
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