I have visited Plimoth Plantation, Colonial Williamsburg, Deerfield Village, etc., and have always enjoyed the experience. Williamsburg is my favorite place, but i have always had the question: we are seeing it at its best-we do not see the dirt, the garbage, the flies, etc. How clean was the place in colonial times? Animal waste (and human) were probably everywhere, and flies must have been everywhere too. plus, when you see the immaculate laundered clothing, you wonder how clean the clothes really were. What about food handling? i’m sure the governer ate well, but what were meals for the servants like?
Again, are we seeing a totally false picture in these places? Or was it possible to live decently?
What makes you say that? I’m not saying they had modern sanitation, but bucket loos, pit toilets and chamberpots are all period solutions to the problem. Plus they used shit and piss for all kinds of stuff, they didn’t generally leave it lying around.
They had soap and irons. It was just a more labour-intensive operation. But labour then was cheaper than today.
Pretty bad by our standards, I’m sure. But not any different than lots of developing countries today.
Plainer and less of it, I’m sure. But servants curled up with hunger are pretty useless. Unless there was outright famine (which, granted, seems to have happened in the colonies) they’d do no worse than back in England. Probably better in some cases.
Sure it was. The notion that everyone before the Modern age was covered in diseases, piss and shit and eating rotten meat is ridiculous.
My grandparents’ farm had electricity and a telephone but no running water or sewage. They had an outhouse located a safe distance away. They bathed in a steel tub with well water heated on a wood stove. They had a washing machine, but without running water it was little more than a tub with a wringer. They managed to keep themselves and their clothes clean.
If the female re-enactors do not die during childbirth on mainstage I ask for my money back.
I have a feeling that they DO pretty things up a bit, the way you’d clean up your house if you know Company is Coming. So, yeah, there are fewer flies, the garbage has been carted farther away than it really would be, and someone cleans the pig shit off the streets. I think real life would be a little dirtier and grimier and smellier, the way Real New York is dirtier, grimier, and smellier than the Las Vegas attraction, or Disney’s Main Street is.
That said, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a couple of quotes (from modern people)
“You smell an Indian camp before you see it.”
-- from the movie *Little Big Man*, but I think it's in Thomas Berger's book, too. (I don't have any idea what an Indian camp out on the Plains smelled like. I DO know that various Indians made the same statement about white settlements, though.
“New Rule: Considering that the major cause of death during the Civil War was diarrhea (True), Civil war re-enactors must fight their battles with steaming load in their pants.”
-- Bill Maher in *More New Rules*.It was perfectly possible to live decently by the standards of the time.
If you’re a modern germophobe who insists on hand sanitizer hourly and twice daily changes of clothes despite never having stepped outside of the air conditioning, well you’d have some seriously psychologically uncomfortable adapting to do. Physically you’d be fine.
If you’re a typical US farm hand or a resident of most countries in the world today, you’d not find much difference versus your life now except the lack of electrical power & entertainment.
Street sweeping was a job–the animal waste might be recycled into fertilizer, but was not let lying around forever. Washing clothes is also labor intensive, but there was plenty of labor.
There are parts of our big cities that smell of human urine.
The 1970 movie Quackser Fortune has a Cousin in the Bronx stars Gene Wilder as a manure collector/street sweeper
I was surprised to learn (in Simon Winchester’s the Madman and the Professor) that boys used to collect dog feces from the streets (in those pre-pooper-scooper days of the Victorian era) to be used for making shoe polish*.
Nevertheless, street sweepers and dog pop collectors couldn’t keep up with the task of managing city street animal waste. From reports of the period, in wet weather it fouled puddles. In dry weather it dried, got beaten into powder, and blown by the wind into your apartment through the windows. There were reasons beyond hoping to catch a cool breeze that the rich lived on the upper floors. And this was an era when women wore long skirts. It’s scary to think what they could end up dragging through. When Sherlock Holmes was analyzing where people had gone on their cab rides by reading the mud splashed up on their cloaks, he wasn’t just looking for fresh red clay.
*thereby giving a whole different interpretation to the phrase “not knowing shit from Shinola”
The gathered dog feces, according to Winchester, were marketed under the name “Pure”, which creates all sorts of cognitive dissonance
It was dysentery but close enough I guess.
An attempt may have been made to clean up the streets a bit but I doubt that it was a priority. Who is going to do this job? Maybe some young kids but who is going to bother paying for the job? No one. Shoveling up the horse shit to use as fertilizer implies that there is a street surface that can be cleaned, you can’t sweep up a muddy street that is half a foot of crap infested mud.
Ever been to a dairy farm? The crap and the mud become inseparable very fast.
And why would you even bother to collect animal waste from the streets when there is an abundant supply on every farm, big or small, every livery stable, etc. Collected and used right where is it produced. It wasn’t like this crap was a valued commodity. I was a nuisance to be tolerated until it dried out or was washed away with the rain. And then you can imagine what the drainage ditches, if any, would smell like.
Germ theory was still in its infancy. Although some scientists were beginning to make the connection between living conditions of filth and illness, the average person did not.
Lots of flies, lots of shit from multiple animal sources and no societal impulse to give a shit, so to speak about cleaning it up.
As for the cleanliness of the people and their clothing, it was not a daily new set of clean clothes like we are used to now, maybe weekly with a bath once a week if you were well to do. Undergarments were changed when they got foul but the outerwear might only get really cleaned seasonally. They didn’t have very many extra sets of clothes. “Wash day? Nothing to wear?” Yeah.
As usual it depended upon you station or class. The upper classes even in smaller towns had people (read; slaves or slightly paid lower class) to do the laundry and drudgery and everyone else was pretty filthy most of the time.
While germ theory came into being pretty late, the correlation between filth and illness has been observed for millennia by ordinarily people.
Interestingly the scientific method when it came during the Age of Enlightenment intially tended to discount said correlation, mainly because of the fact that people, still fell ill in apparently clean conditions and did not in dirty ones… It was the germ theory which filled that gap.
I recall that Williamsburg had a bakery-they got fresh baked bread every day-we usually don’t have this today. So, in some ways it was better. although the barber shop (the barber was the local dentist) was pretty scary.
One thing that has always amazed me about developing countries is that it’s pretty easy to be immaculately clean, even in some of the worst living conditions. I suppose when your clothes count as some of the more valuable processions that you own, you tend to put a little effort into it. That said, kids can get pretty grundgy.
Without a lot of manufactured goods, there isn’t as much trash as you’d expect. But the food handling and flies would probably definitely be a little different than you are used to.
The horse problem was not trivial. There was a lot of horse pucky going around.
“The main problem, however, was manure. A horse produces between 7 and 15 kilos of manure daily. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced nearly 1,200 metric tons of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of. In addition, each horse produces nearly a litre of urine per day, which also ended up on the streets.”
This is from the following web site, entitled "The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 "
Don’t you just long for the Good Ole Days? I hear their dentists were pretty fun, too.
Yeah, what **Daylate **said. I have horses. Good lord, they crap a lot. High fiber diets, you know. And flies breed in manure. With horses being the main transportation back then, the horse crap and flies must have made the streets quite unpleasant.
Night soil was also a thing. Still is a thing, in fact.
Note that it isn’t quite fair to compare the late Victorian urban environmental levels of horse manure (and shit in general) with that of colonial period, for two reasons:
[ol]
[li]much higher density of people, and hence horses[/li][li]much less need for the manure in industrial processes - e.g [/li][ul]
[li]Chrome tanning decreased need for urine and faeces collection, [/li][li]The invention of guncotton and opening of Chilean saltpetre supplies obviated the need for nitraries for gunpowder, [/li][li]Those same saltpetre supplies and the development of superphosphate production reduced the need for manure as fertilizer etc.[/li][/ul][/ol]
So increased supply and reduced demand = surplus.
The small towns in the old west would have been a total mess with a street of mud that had horses going thru it all the time making a mud/horse manure mess. I read that at times one could be knee deep in muck and children could almost drown in it. Women and children often had to be carried across. Thats why they had the high wooden sidewalks.
The worse times were spring and fall where the roads went from snow to dirt and back again with alot of mud in between.
Have you ever noticed that all the houses in Manhatten are built with “stoops”?—a short flight of stairs leading up to the front door.
The reason for the steps was to make sure that your house was above the level of the horse shit.
But remember…don’t look at history thru modern lenses… People back then lived with shit and flies because there was no choice, so they just accepted it, without complaining. Just like nowadays, we live with snowstorms–it’s just part of life, right?
In the future, when scientists learn how to control the weather, people will be astounded that we primitives of the 21st century lived in constant fear that hurricaines,tornadoes and snowstorms could destroy our lives.
Note the overlap between “old west” and “late Victorian”.
No. The reason for the stoop is because that’s what the Dutch did back home. Because of literal flooding.