Ghosts in the Woodwork
A house in Maryland reveals its many secrets, once the clutter of two centuries is stripped away.
BY ADAM GOODHEART
The 19th-century rats had been kleptomaniacs
of the most exasperating kind: industrious, stealthy,
and utterly indiscriminate. I can imagine the traps
set for them, the important papers searched for in
vain, the servants scolded, the children reduced to
tears. But the full extent of their felony was revealed
on a wet December morning on Maryland's Eastern
Shore when my carpenter, Brice, started pulling the
clapboard siding off the old frame wing of my house.
"There's something you need to see,"
he told me when I arrived at the job site that day
for one of my regular inspections. As anyone who has
ever restored a house can attest, those are words
that strike fear into an owner's heart. I knew
that the wing, which I badly wanted to save, wasn't
in the best of shape, and I imagined the worst news
possible—the entire framing reduced to sawdust
and termite spit. But when I rounded the corner of
the building and peered through the gap in the siding,
I saw something I didn't expect: a nearly intact
200-year-old bowl, creamy white with blue feather-edging,
sitting there above the sill.
The walls, it turned out, were full of artifacts stashed
by countless generations of thievish rodents. We found
an Episcopal pocket hymnbook from 1871, the tiny heel
of a lady's shoe, and a silk hair ribbon, still
tied in a neat loop. There were bank checks, a clay
pipe, and a child's penmanship copybook, the
rows of Spencerian pothooks still looping across its
pages. All these things were caked with the same thick
gray dust and mixed with scraps of yellowed newsprint,
which seemed to have been the rats' favorite
insulation. Picking carefully through them, I found
part of a news story describing a local baseball game
in 1890, and another reporting on the czar's
assassination in 1918. I crawled around on my hands
and knees, gathering up the fragments from the dust
before the wind could snatch them. I couldn't
let any of them escape: Each was a message from the
past. Even a shred with the single word TROLLEY in
huge sans serif type seemed freighted with the mysteries
of another age.
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