Fun outhouse trivia–I was building a house in the Swede/Finn area of Telluride, CO. Back in the mining days the Lutherans were supposed to be teetotallers (I’m told), and outhouses would be sited in particular parts of the lots because of the prevailing winds. The Swedes and Finns would of course drink in the outhouse and throw the bottles in. The excavator operator knew where the outhouse would have been, and sure enough there were 30 or 40 intact bottles worth some actual money (from 1880-1920).
My family, starting with my grandparents, had a summer cabin at Lake Shore Park on Lake Winnipesaukee, where all the cabins were owned but sat on land rented from the park owners. There was water piped to the cabins but no sewer lines. In the midst of our area of the park there was a concrete outhouse that was sewered, with separate sides for males and females, I think two or maybe three stalls per side, and toilet paper dispensers in each stall. If you had to go after dark you found your way with flashlight in hand, walking around the boulders and stones and watching out for tree roots from the multitude of pine trees the cabins were nestled among.
Some years ago, after the park was bought out by an association of cabin owners, all the cabins were hooked up to a sewer system and the old concrete outhouse was removed, a good idera as people have been winterizing the summer cabins, or tearing the wee things down and building year-round houses.
My other set of grandparents (mother’s side) had an old New England farmhouse for a summer place with a huge old barn attached via a breezeway, where the well was. When they had it it had indoor plumbing, but at the far end of the barn in one corner there was a single-seat hole-in-a-plank facility to a pit on the ground floor, and another reachable from the second floor of the house via a narrow corridor leading from a bedroom, on a second-floor corridor over the breezeway, and along a raised enclosed corridor along the side of the barn to the rear. So serving as an outhouse but but no one had to actually go outside in bad weather.
The Maine Cabin masters deal with quite a few of them on their show.
One of my dad’s Halloween stories was about youngsters pushing outhouses back from the path so that people going out at night had a chance of falling in. Different times, the forties.
The most recent campgrounds I stayed at had vault toilets. I’m sure they are periodically pumped out. (I’ve seen it done at a different campground) they plead with people not to throw trash as it clogs the hose.
There were hand sanitizer dispensers outside the units.
Brian
There are modern variants still:
When we visited Ireland several years ago, we went to the George Bernard Shaw house (I’m a huge fan of Shaw’s), and we saw that they lived in a neat little multistory brick building smooshed in with similar brick buildings in a block, among similar blocks. In the pre-plumbing age, I believe that they had a brick-lined pit in the back where chamber pots were dumped. Must’ve had an atmosphere all its own.
I try to imagine Holmes and Watson on Baker Street in London perhaps dealing with a similar arrangement. Although I know that by late Victorian times they did have a sewage system that pumped the detritus out to sea. (In early Victorian times, they had the Thames. And it was, by all accounts, pretty awful.)
My friend’s family had an old farmhouse as a vacation/weekend place. While there was indoor plumbing leading to a cesspool, males were strongly encouraged to use the outhouse. More than once, lit fireworks were inserted through the crescent moon while someone was in there. Hilarity ensued. It was a double seater, one at normal toilet height and one much lower for the little kids. I think they may have had it pumped out every now and then. The structure itself was pretty wide. Half for the obvious use and (separated by a a wall) half to store firewood. Hey, since you’re already going out there, you might as well bring back a few sticks.
The cabin we had when I was a kid had an outhouse. The original one was dug and built by my grandpa in the late 40s early 50s. My dad dug and built a new one in the 70s. By that time there were rules on how far it had to be from the lake. He built a two-seater - my mom’s demand. Including my mom there were 5 girls so nighttime visits to the outhouse were much easier if more than one of us could go at a time. I remember my dad dumping in lime (I think that’s what it was) maybe once a year. The toilet paper was kept in a coffee can (back then they were metal) with a lid otherwise the squirrels, mice, and chipmunks would chew it up. My mom also kept incense and matches in there! We didn’t have any water in the outhouse - you would go into the cabin to wash your hands.
My mom has a different cabin now. It has indoor plumbing but the old outhouse is still there and is used. It’s better to use the outhouse on occasion than to overuse the septic tank. It too is a two-seater. When the septic gets pumped out, she has them do the outhouse too.
True story:
A group of us went to the races at Mid-Ohio every year. Most of us stayed at a campground. One of the ladies who may have been the original source of a few “blonde jokes” had to pee but the ladies Porta-Potties were busy so she used a men’s. When she returned she was all bubbly, “Gee the men’s rooms are much nicer. They have a little sink on the wall”. No one had the heart to tell her.
About 20 years ago, I attended a family reunion that was held on the site of an old family farm. There were no structures on the land except for a farmhouse that had been constructed in the days before indoor plumbing.
Instead of renting a portable toilet for the event, the family members in charge built an outhouse - a small structure with a wooden floor and a gap between the roof and the walls. Inside, they built a bench with a hole in it against one wall centered over the pit and put a standard toilet seat over it, and equipped it with toilet paper, hand sanitizer and a bag of lime.
Since it was essentially built to be used for one day only, it was clean and the smell of fresh lumber overwhelmed any human waste smell that might have been detectable. It was also way larger and more comfortable than your standard portable toilet.
I thought it was a great solution for a one day event, but I don’t think it would’ve aged well.
Way back in 1979, my friend and I hitchhiked to Colorado. We ended up at a falling down condemned hotel and camped there for a few days. There was an octagon shaped outhouse on the second floor where the rooms were! Each segment was private. I used it! So very rustic. That’s my only encounter with outhouses.
In my childhood neighborhood (mostly summer cottages), nearly every nearby house had an outhouse, and many of them had ONLY an outhouse, no indoor toilet facilities at all. As kids we’d roam the area freely, using whatever outhouse was handy rather than going all the way home when nature called. Though we did have our local faves. Lack of spider webs was nice, lack of smell was even better.
Now 60+ years later, only one outhouse remains in the neighborhood, and it’s one of our old ones that we gave to a neighbor.
Empire Builder and California Zephyr had stretches where passengers were asked to “please refrain” along stretches of watershed that fed city water systems. There may well have been others but those are the ones I am familiar with.
Amtrak cars are all self-contained now.
Edit: Just remembered a family story. My father was raised in rural Minnesota circa the 1930s when he was a teen. A carload of him and his friends were driving around the countryside creating mischief. They stopped some distance away from a farmhouse and started creeping up on it with the intent of banging on the windows before scattering like quail.
They were about ten yards from the house when the front door banged open and they all froze. It was the mistress of the house and she was making her way to the outhouse. Coming from the lighted indoors she was night-blind and didn’t detect any of the intruders. Right in the middle of the group she decided she didn’t want to go the rest of the way so she hiked up her skirts, squatted, and relieved herself in the midst of them.
Rising, she settled her clothes, turned around, and marched back into the house. The same thought occurred to the whole group: “If we attack the house now, so soon after, she’s going to figure out we were there when she did her business.” They left and found someone else to harass.
This was my uncle’s solution at the old family homestead. The house had burned down decades before, so there was only a barn and a couple of small outbuildings left on the property. Every summer Dad and I would fly back and do unpaid, dirty, tedious, dangerous work for a month or so. There wasn’t so much as a filling station with 15 miles of the place, so he built a nice outhouse under the trees for when the morning coffee had done its job. When we flew back home he’d shovel in some lime and a couple of inches of dirt and call it good. AFAIK we never got it within 6 feet of the surface before we sold the place.
The house I live in is 240 years old and only got indoor plumbing in the 1950’s I believe. No hurry, because from about 1930 on, it was only a summer place. Dang that must have strengthened the moral sinews to spend every winter using an outhouse, in New England.
I’ve used many an outhouse; I’ve smelled the good, the bad, and the ugly. Best outhouse I ever used was in high Cascades, probably 20 miles out from any road. It had been built with three walls of pine saplings, the bark still on; the fourth side was open to an enormous view that plunged down a thousand feet. I remember it had a flag pole that you could raise to let people know it was occupied.
The worst one was somewhere in the John Muir Wilderness, I think; yellow jackets had taken up residence in the pit. We pooped in the woods.
Thanks to one and all for the opportunity to expound on these topics. I probably dwell on them more than is healthy and am grateful to The Dope for the pretext of working out my kinks.
I reject your collective reality and substitute my own: You never see separate men’s and women’s permanent outdoor facilities at public places such as courthouses and churches because these were among the first venues to benefit from indoor plumbing and the outhouses on such sites have long since deteriorated and been removed. You never see them at historic reconstructions, either. I guess that, in the minds of the re-enactors, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. If there is only one outhouse, it is unisex and marked with the crescent moon. Back in the day, however, buildings that catered to larger mixed congregations at all-day events had two — the men’s marked with a sunburst. It was universally recognized symbology.
The reason private dwellings had only one is economic but also social and biological. Men spent significant portions of the day away from home. In olden times, they could conveniently avail themselves of stables for number one and were likely to use their facilities at the house only for number two. This meant that facilities at the house did not need such a large holding capacity. Stables were then everywhere around the corner as anyone who has spent quality time on Mackinac Island can attest.
I rode Amtrak from Milwaukee to Glacier Park once sometime in the 1980s. The Empire Builder pulled state-of-the-art all-electric passenger cars. Because there was grade maintenance scheduled between La Crosse and the Twin Cities, the porters flipped off the switch to the toilets so there would be no effluent dumped on the work crews while the train traveled that stretch of track. Yes, modern rolling stock still dumps something on the track while underway. It may not be much. I was under the impression that human waste aboard trains is electrically dried so only the vapor is released, but I could be wrong:
In the United States, Amtrak phased out its use of these [hopper] toilets in the 1980s after waste from a Silver Meteor train crossing the St. Johns River in Florida, between Palatka and DeLand, landed on a fisherman who filed a lawsuit.
Such scruples as we indulge in today concerning distance of privies from wells were not always in force.
The above is a 2015 photo of 1866-68 Fort Larned, KS, which was used by the US Army until 1885. It has been renovated since 1957. Officers’ quarters were duplexes for a couple of families. Each shared a privy and a well. This is on the bank of the Pawnee River, so ground water is probably suspect from the get-go by modern standards even without considering the proximity of the well to the privy.
When I went to Boy Scout camp for the summer, early '60s, we had a four hole at least outhouse in a building. We had a game called larry (for latrine) baseball, which consisted of counting the plops. It seems that the pit had a metal layer on a pivot, because when there was enough waste on it, it would turn over dumping it into a deeper put. If this happened, you scored a home run.
I don’t remember a sink in the building, but we had a water spigot outside and I think we washed our hands using it.
AFAIK the gray water from sinks and the relatively few showers is still dumped. Black water is held in tanks and serviced at the destination, and possibly enroute for multi-day runs. No need for fancy drying and/or grinding when you’re stopping every few hours anyway.