BROOKSVILLE – A community of fewer than 1,000 souls located atop a rocky peninsula that just missed being an island, Brooksville isn’t the sort of place you drive through en route to somewhere else. It’s a destination.

And the people who choose to live in the clapboard houses that dot the blueberry barrens are proud of their two-lane roads, and the fact that Buck’s Harbor Market hasn’t been replaced by a certain national retailer’s superstore.

So in a strike against the inevitability of change, Brooksville residents decided to preserve this period in the history of rural Maine. Sunday afternoon they gathered at Town House to bury a time capsule commemorating a unique moment in time – Brooksville, Maine, 2000 – and leave instructions for today’s children to open the box in 2050.

“It’s a wonderful rural town,” said Whitney Landon, a young father who brought his family here five years ago. “Hopefully, it will be recognizable in 50 years.”

The heavy 2- by 3-foot fiberglass box, designed and donated by PenBay Boat Co. of Sedgwick, contains myriad objects local residents believe define our time.

“There’s a collection of things – anything from Pokemon cards and the school athletic uniform, to the annual report,” said Chris Raphael, a local photographer and member of Brooksville’s Millennium Committee, who initiated the time capsule project. “It’s a real potpourri of stuff,” he said.

Pupils at the community elementary school were invited to bring an item each, and last week, they held a ceremony to begin filling the box with the culture of our time.

“Of course, there’s a ‘Harry Potter,’ and a Beanie Baby, and there’s collection of the new quarters,” said Patricia True, a member of the Millennium Committee who cared for the box prior to Sunday’s burial. “But some of the children chose their favorite thing and parted with it,” she said.

Teachers embraced the project as an opportunity for students to explore their hometown, but also because of the possibility that today’s third-graders may be the community leaders who steer Brooksville through the next 50 years.

“They filled the box, and they may be here to open it,” Raphael said.

Town fathers contributed an annual report and a letter to Brooksville’s future residents, written by lifelong resident and First Selectman Kip Leach. The letter describes the details of daily life in a turn-of-the-century town, from where the roads are located to how people make their living.

“What I tried do in that letter was paint a picture of how the town looks today,” Leach said. “We want them to see that a small town like Brooksville could accomplish something like this, and get everyone involved,” he said.

During the past 50 years, Leach said, Brooksville has seen slow growth that hasn’t harmed the community’s essential character. But by 2050, he said, increased development is inevitable.

“Brooksville has been built up, people have been moving to the area, and I’m sure that will continue,” Leach said. “In 50 more years, they can look at our time and see the differences,” he said.

Throughout the past year, Brooksville has held millennium celebrations almost monthly, with a July parade, a family day and garden tour, and other special events, True said. And at each, Raphael captured the people of Brooksville with his camera. Dozens of his photographs joined the artifacts in the time capsule.

Raphael also took portraits of the community groups that make up Brooksville’s social life. From the library board to the Oddfellows, anyone involved in community life joined the portrait that is settling into the frozen ground in southwestern Hancock County.

The photographer also looked back, taking portraits of the community’s oldest residents to accompany a series of tape-recorded interviews in which the town elders describe decades of area history.

When a small group of residents gathered Sunday to bury the sealed box, they realized that adding a tape player – or at least a description of what sort of machine to seek at the local antique store in 2050 – might have been a good idea at this dawning of the age of digitization.

But regardless of how American society changes in the next 50 years, despite any transformation that Brooksville may undergo in the coming decades, the year 2000 will rest deep beneath the soil, waiting for another generation to discover the instructions stored in the town vault and go seeking.

“November 2050,” said Landon, as the small crowd placed the last squares of frozen sod atop the time capsule, wondering if they would live to see it unearthed.

“I’ve got to get it on my calendar,” he said.