Sometime during or just after the Civil War, a black rat in Williamsburg, Virginia, came into possession of a rare trophy: a solid silver fork. The rodent—a member of the ubiquitous species Rattus rattus, which arrived in North America with the Jamestown colonists—was living between the walls in a building that had variously been a home, a shop, a school, and a popular tavern. The rat’s family had likely been there for generations, gradually adding scraps of paper, fabric, crockery, bones, and miscellaneous debris to its massive nest. Pilfering the fork, however, was an unusual accomplishment for a creature that weighed about half a pound.
“This was not a little tiny dessert fork—it was a dinner fork,” marvels Dani Jaworski, manager of architectural collections at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, which came into possession of the tavern building and all its hidden treasures in the 1960s.
That fork—which a maker’s mark dates to between 1861 and 1865—is one of countless objects that the rats of Williamsburg have pushed, dragged, or carried between their teeth to line and decorate their nests since the city became Virginia’s capital in 1699. In the years since Colonial Williamsburg was established as a living history museum in the 1930s, about 1,000 objects of interest have been recovered from historical rat nests, and Jaworksi, the resident rat nest expert, has examined and sorted them into a well-ordered collection.
“Rats are actually little archivists,” Jaworski says, noting that black rats, which rarely range more than 150 feet from their nests, collect a surprising variety of items, which can serve as evidence about what and how people ate, the books and newspapers they read, how they dressed, what they did for work, and how they furnished their homes. “A rat’s nest is a snapshot of people who are long gone.”