Educate me about outhouses, please

Factual Questions
1

I was born in a city, and pretty much always lived in suburbs. My only exposure to rural/country life has been on media or while driving through it on the way to another city/suburb, and as a result I’ve never seen an outhouse in the flesh as it were, much less been in one or used one.

What I think I know, accumulated from media shows as I said, is that an outhouse is basically a pit (how big/deep?) dug into the earth. You build a seat above it with a hole for the obvious purpose (sometimes outhouses have multiple seats? or that’s just in jokes?) and there’s an enclosure around it, with walls and a roof to protect the users from wind and rain during use. Also some windows/holes/gaps to allow air in and out. (Apparently the moon shaped cutout in the door is almost mandatory.) And … is that it?

No provisions for hand washings?

Once you have your outhouse, is there some maintenance involved? I mean, okay, clean up of accidental messes and sweeping the floor maybe. And obviously the, er, deposits, get broken down by bacteria and insects and what all, and liquidy results diffuses into the surrounding soil, but does the owner have to do something else? Like, feed it a bucket of something chemically useful now and then?

I’ve heard mentions of people making new outhouses. Is this because the old pit gets filled faster than the natural stuff breaks it down?

I assume tp (or Sears catalog pages) are dropped in as well, but what about menstrual products? Tampons, even pads? Or are they disposed of separately somehow?

Can anyone just build an outhouse on their own? Like you buy a bit of land in some not-built up area to camp on in good weather. Can you just go to it with a shovel and some boards, with no license or permit or inspection type government involvement?

Anything else I should know in case I find myself faced with using one? I figure we have enough well-seasoned Dopers that at least some of you might have personal experience of the matter.

2

They’re shitty places.

Sorry, couldn’t resist!

3

You have pretty much figured out all there is and more than that about a shack over a hole in the ground. Usually washing facilities consist of a bucket of water. Wiping rags hung to dry were a common sight, and yes, just exactly what you think they are. You wouldn’t locate an outhouse near a well so running water is unlikely. As is well known, the superlative outhouse was built out of brick.

Also, the hole is often a long trench so don’t go wandering around the back of an outhouse.

4

I helped a friend erect an outhouse on his wooded property. We spent an entire weekend digging. The hole was deep enough for us to eventually drop in a 55 gallon drum, then another 55 gallon drum atop the first. Both drums had their tops and bottoms removed.

The “house” was built over the hole. We camped on the property many times, always using the outhouse and always dropping some chemicals (Lime?) at the end of our stay.

The washing up area was back at the campsite. The outhouse was situated about 50 yards away.

5

The outhouses i use (on vacation) have effectively a giant bucket in the bottom, and once a year, the sewage boat comes by, and takes away the waste. Yes, i believe someone climbs into the hole to hoist out that bucket. These outhouses have been upgraded to reduce their environmental impact, and the pit is also lined with concrete.

They also have a little hand sanitizer dispenser mounted on the outside, and some strips of flypaper inside to reduce the number of flies. A ventilation fan makes a huge difference in the odor. So does closing the lid. You REALLY want to close the lid after use.

Yes, multi seat outhouses are a thing.

6

My outhouse use was about 50 years ago, but I also recall dropping some chemicals in before we left.

7

I used to work as a ridge runner for the Appalachian Trail and one of my less glamorous duties was outhouse maintenance. Actually, thinking about it, my overall job could be equally titled AT janitor.

There are primarily 3 types of outhouses. the first type is what you describe, called a pit outhouse. It is the lowest capacity and the waste breaks down slowly. It is only suitable for very low usage on the trails and fastly disappearing from the AT for that reason. It basically is an anaerobic cesspool digester.

All sorts of items end up there that should not, and yes that lowers the capacity. These types typically do not have multiple seats. These also require the least maintenance, as unless there is an epic retrieval of something down there, it’s set it and forget it, and once it’s full its done and a new pit must be dug and the house moved to it. Usually they are enclosed, but also can be partly open like a bathroom stall with a door, or a partition to go around for privacy, sometimes without a roof. The enclosure does not really matter to its function although odor control can be incorporated into the structure. Hand washing is up to you to bring and use, there are no provisions in most, though post COVID sometimes they will have hand sanitizer.

The second type is a composter type, which instead of a pit the pile is at or above ground level so air can get at it. This causes much faster breakdown and thus higher capacity. This type sometimes has multiple heads if capacity needs it. Some of these also contain urinals to redirect away pee away from the pile as that can block oxygen from it. Ideally these are made of 3 sections which the head (toilet) can be positioned over 1 of those 3 at a time. What happens is the waste piles up in section 1 till it’s full, then the head is moved to section 2, section 1 is left to decompose. When section 2 is full the head is moved to section 3, leaving 1 and 2 decomposing. When section 3 is filled section 1 is emptied into the forest floor and is pretty much benign compost with no resemblance to the original product, then the head is moved back to 1 and the process continues.

Maintenance of this one is a bit higher and benefits from the users dumping a load of ‘duff’ into the head with their load they drop. The duff (basically fallen leaves/dirt/forest floor stuff), helps it break down faster. It also requires someone (me) to push the ‘pile’ out of the center so the bin fills evenly. This type has much higher capacity and all in all is not all that bad to maintain. The odor is much less than a pit composter and many times has no repulsive odor.

The 3rd type is very high maintenance and has a screen under the head where waste falls on. The screen must be removed daily and set outside to dry/dehydrate before dumping the contents and reinstalling the screen. The only place on the AT I know this is used is in New Hampshire by sites maintained by the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC). These types have the highest capacity (and sometimes multi-seats), and the AMC has lots of money to pay people to do that.

8

Been a while since I used an outhouse. No, there was no plumbing, but there was a container of water. You might be able to get away with dumping your toilet paper down the john— not sure how biodegradable it is— but I would definitely not throw in tampons, plastic moist towelettes or pads; put those in the appropriate trash. I have seen multiple-seat outhouses; it’s no joke (I suppose that if you have to go, you have to go, right?)

9

Certainly multi-seat outhouses have existed and used to be fairly common. Sometimes the purpose was to have multiple users at a time, but sometimes it was just to have different-sized holes for different-sized tushes.

I have seen a photo of an outhouse where there was only room inside for one seat, but there was a board with multiple holes in it that stuck out each side of the building so you could slide the board back and forth to select the hole you wanted.

10

When I went to Boy Scout camp in the summer, each site had a toilet facility that had an outhouse and (outside, under a protective overhang) piped-in water was used in a sort of trough with multiple spigots when you could wash up and brush your teeth (and shave, I suppose). The outhouse had two or three seats with no allowances for privacy. As far as I know it was basically a big pit in the ground, possibly concrete-lined. Several times a week those assigned latrine duty washed the outhouse seats with disinfectant and poured some down into the pit (it didn’t help with the smell). So it was clean but malodorous.

Many year later I went back to visit, and found that the entire building had been picked up and rotated around the sink area. Evidently they just sealed up the human waste under a concrete lid and dug a new pit on the other side. Now that the camp has been closed and most of the buildings torn down I imagine that the concrete seals are still there, holding in place what is in effect a Human Toxic Waste Dump.

When our daughter went to Girl Scout Camp many years ago, their toilet facilitiues were either completed plumbed, or else consisted of pretty deep pit latrines that I think were regularly pumped out. I don’t think you could get away with simply leaving it there the way they did with our camp.

Weird note: My friend once dropped his official Boy Scout Flashlight down the pit of one latrine during a nocturnal visit. It continued to shine on for many days, which is, I suppose, a testament to the engineering of those things. No one wanted to even think about retrieving it.

11

My mom grew up in a house that didn’t get an indoor toilet until she was 10 or so. The outhouse was down the hill from the house, and it was exactly as the simple type described above. They poured something in weekly to cut down on the smell, and a new pit had to be dug periodically. They used paper to wipe (old Sears catalogues were a staple), and handwashing was done back in the house. Some households had a covered bucket next to the throne for used toilet paper or paper. Of courseno one dropped menstrual products or foreign materials down there, just as you don’t drop them in a flush toilet. It was also great training for the new indoor toilet that was connected to a septic tank, since everyone was already trained not to drop extraneous materials in.

I gather that my grandmother put her foot down and refused to deal with chamberpots, so my mom remembers having to make her way out there with a flashlight in the middle of the night.

12

The last time I used one (Spring 2023), there was a large bucket of cedar shavings with a coffee can for keeping the smell down, seemed to work.

According to Unca Cecil, the ventilator in the door didn’t become a half moon until Al Capp used it for Li’l Abner comix.

13

My parents and I lived in a house with an outhouse as described by InternetLegend, until I was in 4th grade, when we moved to a house with indoor plumbing. There was no running water in that first house either. We did use toilet paper, but it had to be a very thin paper, like the kind most RV owners use, so as not to clog up the works. As for the extra seats, we had two seats but not for togetherness. We had one large hole and one smaller one. If I’d had to use the one my dad used I might have fallen in! We used a chamberpot if needed at night and boy was the rim of that thing cold in the winter.

Not exactly the good old days but it didn’t kill me either. My folks were starting ouit in farming and were glad to have a roof over our heads, and by the time I was old enough to care “what people think” we had moved to a house with all the amenities.

14

My great-grandparents still lived in a house with an outhouse when I was a child; they kept goats on a small patch of land near Newberg, Oregon. I wasn’t aware of any lime that I was supposed to drop in the hole, but that may be because they didn’t want a little kid mis-using it. Because of the flies, there were always spiders around, especially (it seemed) under the seat. They did have regular toilet paper by that time. My father told stories about using the old Sears and Wards catalog sheets as toilet paper when he was growing up, which sounds uncomfortable.

One time I spent a couple of weeks in a rural town in Hokkaido, Japan, with a farming family in an old country-style house. They had a sort of hybrid arrangement – the toilet was in a room that (I suspect) had been added onto the house – it was the last room in the back before the back door. It was still a pit of some kind, and the fixture was the (now) old-fashioned squat toilet that was pretty common in Japan at the time. There was definitely lime right there that I was instructed to use every time. I don’t remember any smell, though, and I always assumed it was the lime that did it. There was indoor plumbing at least to the kitchen sink and to the bathing room, and electricity, but no central heating either.

15

When I was about 10 years old I remember a family gathering at my great grandmothers house. Most of the men spent the day digging a new outhouse hole. After the hole was dug the outhouse was picked up and moved over the new hole. Then the dirt from the new hole was used to fill the old. The only water in her house was a hand pump in the kitchen. She had only recently retired her old wood stove and had an electric range installed. The next year her house was plumbed for water, this also included and indoor toilet and a water heater. Unfortunately she passed away before the work was done. This all happened about 1966 and 1967.

16

I was born in a small cottage in an English village. Water came from a common pump on the green and the toilet was a borehole in the garden.

I am pretty sure that the outhouse was brick built with a slate roof and the inside was limewashed regularly. There were two holes - one larger than the other, so kids could use the smaller seat. It was not intended that there would be two people in there at the same time.

17

Are you talking about the “hole over a pit” model? If so, then what “works” could you possibly clog up?

Our cabin had the traditional old-timey pit outhouse when I was younger (subsequently changed to a composting toilet and then full plumbing). At night, you had the choice of going out with a flashlight or using the thunder mug indoors (so-called because of the possible noises created when using it). Hand washing was done inside the cabin. We had no qualms about throwing any kind of refuse in there. We didn’t use it often enough for us to have to dig a new pit.

18

An outhouse situated in someone’s yard on Crooked Creek near the Allegheny River. Picture taken from my pontoon boat.

19

Sounds exactly like my brother’s first house. No running water, an outhouse out back and a pot to pee in at night. He hauled water in 5-gallon jerry cans from a river some distance away for bathing and for washing dishes.

In Vietnam, it was all outhouses. We had a 4-holer (luxury!), but most of them were 2-holers. Maintenance consisted of some poor sods dragging the cut-down 55 gal drums of waste out from under them, dumping some gas on top of the diesel, and lighting them.

20

The Sears catalog was the preferred source of wiping paper, until they switched to glossy paper.

Where available, corncobs were often preferred. Depending on what variety of corn the local farmers grew, they might be too small. If they had been sitting in the storeroom, drying out too long, they might become overly abrasive. But there was a certain Goldilocks zone, in which a corncob was considered the perfect tool for the job.

According to folklore, the crescent moon indicated the women’s facility. But in real life, there was usually only one per household, and it was used by everybody.