The Outhouse
After the blog entry last week about my Mother's rhubarb patch planted where the old outhouse used to be, my cousin emailed me the following excerpt from our recently deceased Uncle Tony’s memoirs about the outhouse on the family farm where he, my mother and their 9 other siblings grew up during the Great Depression and WWII:
The Outhouse
By Uncle Tony
During my entire childhood and teenage years on the farm, our home, and every home in our community that I know of, had no running water or indoor plumbing system. Even our elementary school in St. Patricks had no indoor plumbing or bathrooms. It wasn't until 1945, after I joined the Navy, that a bathroom, including running water to the kitchen was installed in our farmhouse. Until that time, our source for water consisted of a cistern near the house, as well as one near the barn, fed by rain water from the roof of each building. This water was used only for laundry and washing, drawn from the cistern by a pitcher pump in the kitchen. A well near the barn provided water for drinking and cooking, which needed to be carried year round from the well to the house daily, kept in a bucket on the kitchen counter.No bathroom in the house meant that one was forced to go outside to a privy to relieve oneself. Unless one has actually expienced the lack of running water in the home and had to "go outside" before bedtime and early morning-- spring , summer, fall, and winter-- it is impossible to describe adequately what this necessary part of life on the farm was all about. No words can express the mindset of anyone who was subjected to doing without inside plumbing. Some third or fourth generation members of our families may think they can relate to outside toilets claiming to have camped in a "primitive" campground. Take my word for it--it's not the same by a long shot! On sweltering summer days, wasps and other insects, both flying and creeping kind were also regular users. Nature's call often was secondary to these critters when they were in a bad mood. Privy sitting in such circumstances became an art.
A dirt path led to the old outhouse, also known as the privy, or shanty, which was located adjacent to the orchard about 25 yards east of our house, just beyond the grape arbor. It was a three holer, with two different sized big holes and one lower child's station with a smaller hole. Large families needed more than one relief station!! Lumber from a poplar tree was usually the choice for the seats, since it was close grained and free of splintering, as is the case with oak. It was a somewhat dilapidated structure. Cracks in the walls provided much needed ventilation. The free swinging door was held closed by a small homemade wire hook. The famous Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs were standard equipment. Every spring when the ground was still frozen, Dad would clean out the contents of a year's use through an extended trap door on the backside of the building. I helped once, and never again! This process was often referred to as honeydipping.
During the depression, President Roosevelt formed a number of federal agencies, including the WPA (Works Project Administration) aimed at putting unemployed to work. Many of us remember this agency by the work done cleaning roadside ditches in our community.. Those in this ditch cleaning program were supplied with a turtle back shovel, assigned to a certain area, and worked with scores of others cleaning those ditches with no equipment other than those shovels. The beneficiaries of this program earned their pay, and didn't simply "draw checks".
Another of this agency's directives was to improve the nations health conditions. One way to accomplish this was to make low cost privies available to the rural masses. These privies would be sanitary and healthful in their use, stemming the spread of diseases such as hookworm. To the best of my knowledge, nearly all farms in our community availed themselves of this government subsidized program. My research shows that the farm family receiving a new outhouse would pay for the materials (about $17 per outhouse) while the WPA supplied the labor free. Records show that the WPA built a total of 2,309,239 outhouses and employed thousands of individuals.
Our new WPA privy was delivered and installed in a new location on a bright spring day while we were in school. It was a beautiful new white building with a concrete floor and only one hole. It sported a ventilation system and a hinged cover for the hole. Our outhouse was "purified" by applying lime. It helped to "sweeten" the smells and kept down the spiders. The new privy was hardly the epitome of sanitation, but it was a vast improvement for that day over what we previously had, and provided relief for family and visitors for many years. It served us well for many years until indoor plumbing was installed in our farmhouse in 1945, after most of us left home for good. Most privies were soon replaced with bathrooms and indoor plumbing after WWII, thus another symbol of rural life was lost forever. James Whitcomb Riley even memorialized the outhouse in his Ode to the Outhouse.
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