Treasure jar found 32 years after class

HARRISONBURG, Va. | More than 30 years ago, three Mennonite girls stashed a little glass jelly jar above the ceiling of a classroom closet at Mount Clinton Elementary School.

They stuffed it to the brim with everything important to them. As the decades passed and the girls grew up, the jelly jar was mostly forgotten.

Until now.

In early December, someone at the school - now the home of Calvary Christian Academy - found the little treasure while installing insulation.

Inside the jar, along with dozens of trinkets, coins and toys, was a two-page note claiming responsibility for the stash. The note was written and signed by three sixth-grade girls: Angela Kreider, Donna Shank and Susan Harman.

Within an instant, a reunion was planned. Donna and Susan, it was discovered, still lived in the area.

So the two - now mothers in their mid-40s - traveled back to the old building to reclaim their hidden bounty. The third friend, Angela, now with a doctorate at the University of Virginia, was found and told a little later that week. The secret of the jelly jar, the girls told their friend, was out of the closet.

It all began in the early 1970s, just outside of Harrisonburg.

Back then, there was no Valley Mall or Harrisonburg Crossing. The Friendly City was about half its current size, and outside the limits, farmland stretched as far as the eye could see. For Angela, Donna and Susan, life in rural America was everything they could dream of.

Susan was the daughter of a dairy farmer. She lived on Mountain Breeze Farm with her parents and two older siblings. She never wanted to get into trouble. Donna, who is also Susan’s first cousin, lived on a dairy farm about two miles away.

The girls’ church friend, Angela, was the only non-farmer of their clan. Angela lived closer to town and had a pool. Her dad owned Kreider’s Machine Shop.

“Angela was the adventurer,” Susan said. “She had a wild imagination.”

The three girls did everything together. They held slumber parties, swam, hiked, fished and rode dirt bikes. They dug tunnels in the hay, slept in the barn and took rides around the pastures in Donna’s parents’ Jeep.

And, like good church girls, they did everything wearing dresses.

By the fourth grade, the girls landed in the same school.

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