Deciding what to bury under Baltimore's Washington Monument for the next century or so took only a matter of days.

When Michael Raphael saw the scaffolding go up around the 178-foot column for a $5.5 million restoration project last year, he asked the Mount Vernon Place Conservancy for permission to climb it with his company's 3-D scanning equipment to document the condition of the first president's statue at the top.

A cast replica of George Washington based on 3D scans of the statue atop the Washington Monument is among the items to be placed in the monument's new cornerstone.

 (Colin Campbell/Baltimore Sun)

Then construction workers in February discovered the cornerstone six feet underground and conservationists opened the 200-year-old time capsule to find jars containing old newspapers, coins, an image of Washington and a copy of his farewell speech.

Those have been removed to be preserved, so Raphael offered to replace them with 3-D printed, metal-cast prints of the statue — a 2015 relic that would also show future historians the rate of the marble statue's weathering. The cornerstone will be reburied this week.