it’s to let light in. why not the moon? i’ve seen stars, etc. people just didn’t know what to put so let in the moonlight.
If anybody hasn’t seen pit toilets in this day and age, they haven’t been out hiking in remote mountain locations. You can still find them at trailheads in the Cascade mountains, once in a while; I encountered one in Northern California on a hike there.
oh wow, that makes sense. i guess i never thought of it since there always seem to be lights installed near them.
My take on it? You need a window for light, but you don’t want a big gaping hole because otherwise you’d have no privacy. So you have a nice sliver moon that lets in enough light to see, but otherwise keeps you from being seen.
So that’s just what I pulled out of my ass.
I’m astonished that there are so many outhouses left. I grew up on a farm. My grandparents added an indoor toilet to our farmhouse in 1946, six years before I was born. They moved the outhouse across the road into one of the fields. It was occasionally used (with Sears catalogs for toilet paper) until the mid-1960’s. I never saw a outhouse after 1970 on any farm.
I wouldn’t count a Port-a-Potty as an outhouse. That’s like saying that a car is just a kind of carriage. In any case, I never saw a Port-a-Potty on a farm after 1970 either. I suppose I can understand that it would be hard to build a regular toilet on mountainous land, but then you can’t have a farm on that kind of land either.
I’ve seen them-the old wooden ones-at picnic grounds and camps-we had wooden outhouses at Girl Scout day camp.
Cecil’s column speaks of ventilation by the little hole in the door. Ventilation my ass. You can’t get enough ventilation in one short of a 10000 cfm blower running in high gear.
You made me think of the Heinlein short story about the men stuck in the Moon tunnel that had a leak, and how they stopped the leak. 
:eek: Owwwww!
I’m in Vermont and know more than one person with non-running water toilets. One is an outhouse (they have water to a shower and kitchen sink in their cabin but the water usually freezes anyway) and the other is a composting toilet. With the former, I think they spread lye every now and again. With the latter, you do your business and then cover it with cedar chips. Remarkably not stinky.