Annie Deihm and the Century Safe: Part 4
A somewhat doubtful future
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Release Date: March 3, 2026
A somewhat doubtful future
The ceremony had been performed. The key turned. The signatures witnessed. Annie Deihm’s bridge to 1976 – her hundred-year conversation with Americans yet unborn – stood inside Statuary Hall, placed alongside marble likeness of Revolutionary War heroes Nathanael Greene and Ethan Allen; Founding Fathers Johnathan Trumble, Samuel Adams, and Robert Livingston; and John Winthrop, who arrived aboard the Arabella in June of 1630 and established Boston.
For a brief moment, it seemed as though the Century Safe had secured its place in the national story.
But it hadn’t.
The previous year, the U.S. House of Representatives had accepted the safe on behalf of the American people. The Senate, however, had repeatedly failed to follow suit. During one of the many times the topic was raised, Minnesota Senator William Windom had called the Century Safe “small business,” noting. “I think that the Senate will not agree to this resolution if they know what it is.” 1
Windom set about explaining the resolution and a vote was called. Sixteen yeas. Twenty-four noes.
Then on February 28, 1879 – six days after the safe had been installed, influential Vermont Senator George Edmunds, who’d won his first election in 1854 and been in the U.S. Senate since 1866, proposed an amendment to the appropriations bill: “No work of art or manufacture shall be exhibited in the National Statuary Hall, the Rotunda, or the corridors of the Capitol, unless by permission of the Joint Committee on the Library.”
Then he added: “other than the property of the United States.”
The suggestion was clear. Congress was tired of people bringing “…everything they have got that they think can be packed off on Congress, and [persuading] and [over-persuading] us to let them stick it up somewhere.” The Century Safe could stay for now, but it would never be considered the property of the United States. 2
And that distinction would prove fatal to Annie’s design.
No government custodian could be assigned. No preservation plan could be established and no legal protection could be guaranteed.
The Safe had been admitted into the Capitol – but it didn’t belong.
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On July 2, 1881, President James A. Garfield was shot in the back by Charles Guiteau, a disgruntled political activist and Garfield supporter. Doctors were unable to remove the bullet, and the Chief Magistrate of the United States succumbed to his injuries six weeks later on September 19. Once more, America had lost a president to an assassin’s bullet.
Garfield had contributed his photograph and autograph to Annie’s Centennial albums. He had participated in the 1879 closing ceremony, placing a photograph of William K. Rogers into the Safe. Annie would later suggest that Garfield had expressed sympathy for her cause and “had kindly promised to restore it to the position originally assigned it.” 3
Whether that promise was formal or hopeful is impossible to say.
But after his death, Annie did what she always did when history shifted: she built a record.
She assembled a memorial journal – two hundred pages, though only twenty-two devoted to the slain president’s life. The rest contained engravings, autographs, biographical sketches, and materials drawn from The United States Centennial Welcome, Our Second Century and other publications in which Annie had a hand.
The Safe had been sealed, but the woman who had conceived it had not stopped collecting.
That was the quiet genius of her project. The Safe was never meant to be static. It was the anchor point of a much larger system. Annie envisioned a living archive of American leadership and exceptionalism between 1876 and 1976. Her later works – Merchants of Our Second Century: Representatives Americans, commemorative journals, expanded autograph compilations – were all extensions of that idea.
The Safe was the resting place. But the work was ongoing.
Through the 1880s and 1890s, newspapers continued to mention Annie, now regularly fashioning herself as simply C. F. Deihm.
They praised her perseverance. Her patriotism. Her enterprise.
They called her “a living example of what perseverance and courage can accomplish for a woman.” They credited her with originating the Century Safe and carrying the undertaking “through by sheer determination and persistent effort.” 4
But the tone shifted subtly.
The Safe “was the occasion of great interest.” 5
She “earned her prominence.” 6
It “is, or ought to be, on exhibition at the Capitol.” 7
Past tense. Qualified praise. Admiration edged with distance.
By 1901, just twenty-two years after the sealing, a reporter went looking for Annie’s Century Safe at the Nation’s capitol.
What he found was bleak:
“On the portico of the national capitol, discredited and consigned to neglect, the ‘Century Safe’ with its contents of autographs and photographs of representative men of a former generation and other patriotic relics, has faded from public interest. Concealed behind the white painted pine board in which it is boxed, it occupies an inconspicuous position, and its purpose in history is forgotten.
“Perhaps not one hundred persons in the capital city, and barely an equal number outside it, retain the merest recollection of the Century Safe,” noted the reporter. “Even around the capitol building the memories attached to it have strangely passed from mind.”
The Architect of the Capitol could provide only “fragmentary bits of information.”
Without owner, without custodian, its preservation to the fulfillment of its mission unprovided for, it is confronted by a precarious future and is permitted to hold its present position on sufferance.” 8
Annie’s audacious idea, her century-long bridge between the people of 1876 and those of 1976, had become an administrative inconvenience.
Despite being nearly seventy at the turn of the century, Annie kept working. She was still publishing her weekly paper and still collecting autographs.
And still trying to persuade governors, senators, and mayors to sign album pages for future Americans.
In 1905 she wrote to officials across the country offering them an opportunity to “perpetuate their fame and name for at least 100 years.” For ten dollars per state delegation, she would guarantee inclusion in a second sealed Century Album to be opened in 1976. 9
Whether many accepted her offer is unknown.
But what is clear is this: she never stopped building toward a future she would not see.
Three years later, a friend observed that Mrs. Deihm was “still full of patriotic impulse and determined to put in shape for her possible departure, the contents of the Centennial Safe.” 10
Annie was beginning to think about legacy.
The sealed Century Safe was meant to be only part of Annie’s vision.
When the safe was closed in 1879, three additional albums had been placed in Statuary Hall alongside it – not locked inside, but kept nearby, accessible, designed to grow over time.
The first was an autograph album with spaces for 100,000 signatures. It was intended that Presidents and Vice Presidents, Speakers of the House, Cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, generals, admirals, and state governors who took office after 1879 would add their signatures to this growing record.
The second album was for photographs of succeeding Presidents and Vice Presidents.
The third was designed to hold photographs of Supreme Court justices, Cabinet officers, military leaders, senators, and representatives. The plan called for every two years, photographs of four prominent men in the navy, four in the army, two senators, and two representatives from each region of the country to be added to the collection.
These albums were meant to be updated regularly – every two to four years – creating a living record that would span from 1879 to 1976. At the opening ceremony in 1976, they would be placed inside the safe alongside the original sealed contents, completing the hundred-year arc.
Twenty-two years after the sealing of Annie’s Century Safe, a reporter asked about these albums. The answer was telling:
“What has become of these albums, which were permitted to remain outside the safe, is now unknown. It is quite possible that they have been encased with the safe, and are safely reposing on its broad top. No one, however, is able to answer the question.” 11
Annie Deihm died of breast cancer on April 5, 1911. She was seventy-seven years old.
She had been under round-the-clock nursing care. According to pension records filed after her death, she died without funds. 12
She was still listed as editor and publisher of Our Second Century. Still, to the end, working on the project she’d started thirty-five years earlier.
The safe she’d built sat on the Capitol portico, boxed up and forgotten. The combination was lost. The whereabouts of the key unknown, and the albums meant to be updated had never been touched.
America’s bicentennial was still 65 years in the future. Annie wouldn’t be there, and her Century Safe she’d built had been forgotten.
One year after Annie’s death, someone tried to preserve what she’d built.
In early 1912, a Miss Emma R. Sutton approached the Daughters of the American Revolution with a request. According to the organization’s magazine, Miss Sutton asked “that the National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution, take over the custody of an album containing photographs of all of the famous people in the United States in 1876, which Mrs. C. F. Deihm had at the Exposition in Philadelphia.”
The album, she explained, was connected to the safe “in the Capitol in Washington” that was “sealed to be opened in 1976.” 13
Miss Sutton, the record noted, was “afraid it may be forgotten.”
The DAR declined, and just like that, 1976 was all on Emma.
Copyright 2026 Lori Olson White
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The Century Safe Method teaches you Annie Deihm’s pioneering approach, refined with 150 years of hindsight and adapted for family-scale projects today and into the future
This isn’t a vague “make a time capsule” guide. This is a complete methodology for creating a Century Safe that:
Actually gets opened (most time capsules don’t)
Engages future recipients (not just passive viewing)
Survives decades of moves, transitions, and forgotten promises
Creates traditions that continue for generations
Your bridge to 2076 is waiting.
In 2076, someone will open what you’re creating.
They’ll read your letters. See your photos. Discover the “Five Things” about you that no historical record captured. Read your Good Ancestor statement and understand what you wanted to be remembered for.
They’ll sign the signature page beneath your name, answering the questions you posed across fifty years. They’ll feel connected to someone they never met but who thought about them anyway.
And maybe - just maybe - they’ll decide to build a Century Safe for 2126, continuing the chain you started.
That’s legacy. That’s bridge building. And it’s possible.
Get your copy of The Century Safe Method today.
The Story Catalog is not an archive in the usual sense. What you’ll find here is a living catalog of Lost & Found Stories – deeply researched historical narratives told in parts, discovered through newspapers, letters, court records, logs, and the stubborn human habit of leaving traces behind.
Have you read the incredible true story of Aimee Henry and Mary Martha Parker? Call Me a Bastard is my longest serialized story to-date, and the one that started it all here on the Lost & Found Story Box. Check out the story from the beginning.
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End Notes
1 Congressional record – Senate, 1878, P. 4721
2 Congressional Record – Senate, February 28, 1879, P 2078
3 “Garfield’s Memory Journal
4 “Mrs. Deihm’s Success,” Daily, Alta, CA, February 12, 1888; “What a Berks Lady Has Achieved,” Reading Times, reading, PA, May 22, 1893, P. 4.
5 “An Enterprising and Widely Known Lady,” The Morning Journal-Courier, New Haven, CT, February 4, 1888, P. 2.
6 “An Enterprising and Widely Known Lady,” The Morning Journal-Courier, New Haven, CT, February 4, 1888, P. 2.
7 “Mrs. Deihm’s Project: She Intends to Raise $160,000 to Buy Gen. Washington’s Headquarters,” The Washington Post, Washington DC, June 1, 1890, P. 9.
8 “It is now Neglected: Century Safe of Centennial is Boxed up and Forgotten. No One Knows Where the Key is - Story of Mrs. Diehm’s Gift to Government During Hayes’ Administration – Forced out Statuary Hall,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle, WA, April 13, 1901, P. 7.
9 “To Perpetuate Fame: Unique Offer of a Pennsylvania Woman to Iowa Officials,” The Sioux City Journal, Sioux City, IA, January 13, 1905, P. 3.
10 “Mrs. Deihm Finishes a Remarkable Work,” The Jersey Journal, Jersey City, NJ, February 8, 1908, P. 16
11 “It is now Neglected: Century Safe of Centennial is Boxed up and Forgotten. No One Knows Where the Key is - Story of Mrs. Diehm’s Gift to Government During Hayes’ Administration – Forced out Statuary Hall,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle, WA, April 13, 1901, P. 7.
12 U.S., Civil War and Later Wars Index to Remarried Widow Pension Applications, 1848-1934
13 Official National Board of Management, N. S. D. A. R., June 5, 1912, American Monthly Magazine, P. 245
This part really underscores how fragile legacy can be when it isn’t formally protected. Annie’s vision was so ambitious and forward-looking, yet without institutional backing it slowly slipped into obscurity almost immediately. The image of the safe, meant for the future, already forgotten within a couple of decades is striking, and a bit haunting. It makes you wonder how many other “bridges to the future” have quietly disappeared the same way.
Oh, Lori, you have not failed your mission. Annie’s spirit is now in you. An incredible piece and perfect for our time approaching the semi quincentennial.