How Rats Saved Colonial Williamsburg

People living their everyday lives in their everyday homes have no idea that hundreds of years in the future, the everyday items in your everyday home might be historically significant. People move, throw out trash, give away belongings, until there's nothing left for historians to study. And for 99% of places, it does not matter. But priorities change, and sometimes the smallest scraps of paper can be very significant in telling a story.

The rats who lived unseen in the walls of buildings in Colonial Williamsburg for many generations over hundreds of years weren't heroes. They were just doing what pack rats do, which is collecting things for their nests. Many of the things they saved -buttons, utensils, scraps of newspapers, pottery shards, fabric, or anything that caught their eyes- shine a light on what people were doing in those buildings during the early days of the United States. This is particularly important as a new part of Williamsburg is being preserved. The building that once held the Bray School was only confirmed in 2021. It tells a story that has been overlooked in the past, of a school that taught around 400 Black children to read in the late 1700s. Read how the history of the school is being investigated and how the rats who collected artifacts are helping at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: H. Zell)