Recently, I ran across a book high on the shelves in my office that I’d forgotten about. Pulling it down with the intention of merely perusing a few pages, I ended up reading all the way through.

Written by Ronald Barlow and titled The Vanishing American Outhouse: A History of Country Plumbing (1995), the volume covers various aspects of rural toiletry. But it’s essentially a history of the outhouse, containing nearly 200 photographs and plan drawings. Now when was the last time you cogitated upon outhouses, much less availed yourself of one?

This is not a purely academic matter. In his introduction, the author advises us that there are currently “at least four million old-fashioned privies doing business in backyards from Maine to California.”
Barlow provides a wealth of outhouse lore ranging from a history of toiletry (“From Paddles to Pull-chains”) to a list of common names (Jakes, pokey, easer, Johnnie, head, backhouse, the throne, potty, auntie, privy, etc.) to building materials, architecture, and locations (behind the main house, at the edge of a garden or cliff, over creeks and ponds, at the ends of docks, or just about any site you can imagine) and onward to the “Outhouse Boom” of 1933-1945 (when over two million “sanitary privies” were constructed as part of the federally sponsored WPA programs).

There are photos of one- through six-holers, numerous double-decker models (one marked “faculty” on top and “students” below), and all the paraphernalia one associates with outhouses: corncob boxes, old catalogs, lime buckets, fly swatters, wasp nests, and black snakes. A half-moon sawed into a privy door served as ventilation and as the symbol meaning “Ladies Room,” while a sunburst pattern indicated male use. Circles, hearts, diamonds, triangles, and V-shaped notches “mirrored those found on early barns and outbuildings.”

In short, if the subject interests you, The Vanishing American Outhouse makes for some good reading. But the book’s text and photographs are based primarily on outhouses in the western United States. What about the outhouse here in the southern mountains?

Alas, it appears that the outhouse has been sadly neglected by our region’s cultural historians. Horace Kephart doesn’t touch upon the topic in Our Southern Highlanders (1913). Neither does John C. Campbell in The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921). And despite the fact that he devotes space to cabins, barns, grist mills, smokehouses, springhouses, blacksmith shops, corn cribs, pig pens, root cellars, apple houses, and chicken houses in Historic Buildings of the Smokies, Ed Trout never even once mentions the outhouse. What’s going on here?

Finally, after culling through almost every volume on the region’s cultural history that I own, I found a reference to outhouses. Lillie McDevitt Clark, a native of Revere, N.C., (near Weaverville), wrote a delightful little book titled Appalachian Memories - A Simpler Time (1984) published by the Reems Creek Valley Homemakers Club in which she credits the rise of the outhouse in Western North Carolina to the coming of Frances Goodrich and the other Presbyterian missionaries in the late 19th century. Frances Goodrich and the Presbyterian missionaries - who would have guessed?

In a chapter entitled “Privies and Table Napkins,” Clark writes:

“Not all mountain communities are alike in Western North Carolina. Some are ‘up and coming,’ as people say, and it was surely true in my day. One community that adjoined Revere was such a community. Mother used to visit there. Most of the homes were painted, and they had privies  new to me, and I was afraid of the holes, especially the big ones, but I liked them better than hiding behind a tree or getting in a ditch or hole. My father had all kinds of little houses built but no privy. We had lots of trees, and it was a good thing, for we could change privies often.”

One of the most illuminating studies of early Western North Carolina is provided by Hazelwood, N.C., author Duane Oliver in Hazel Creek: From Then Til Now (1989). Therein, the author covers every aspect of domestic life from building a cabin to springhouses, corn cribs, barns, fences, spinning wheels, cupboards, and so on. But, alas, he neglected outhouses.

Upon being advised of this grave oversight, Duane  who grew up on Hazel Creek and became a professor of art history at Western Carolina University before his retirement some years ago - responded to my query with a letter that reads:

“Dear George:
I remember two kinds. When we lived at Judson in the 30s ours was a 2-holer that was built over a hole in the ground at the edge of the garden. To keep the odor down and make it, I suppose, more sanitary, lime was periodically put down the hole. This would eventually fill up and a new one be dug and the whole outhouse picked up and placed, as one piece, over the new hole. The old hole would then be filled with rocks and earth.

“My favorite outhouse was when we moved to Possum Hollow on Hazel Creek. Near our house ran a beautiful little branch (Shehan), and the privy was built over it. Two large logs had been laid across the branch and the 2-holer outhouse built on them. This was much more pleasant than the hole-in-the-ground kind for light and air came up the holes which made it a bit chilly in the winter but nice and dry and cool in the summer. This was, of course, ‘straight piping’ in the most direct form. Everyone who lived near a branch had this kind of convenience.

“When the town of Proctor was built by the Ritter Lumber Co. in the teens, the company first built outhouses on platforms, two to a platform, that hung out over the creek where it ran through the new town. This, of course, was awful, with a long row of numerous outhouses, so they were torn down and indoor bathrooms installed in the houses.

“The convention of the 2- or 3-holer is rather interesting. Perhaps 2 or, on a bad day, 3 people used them at the same time. Actually, one hole was almost always smaller for the children’s use. For a child to fall through would have been a real catastrophe, especially in one built over a hole in the ground, which is something I don’t want to think about.

“Before newspapers and Sears catalogs were readily available, everyone used large leaves and corn shucks and, painful to think about, corn cobs which were softened by rubbing them. I can’t recall an outhouse with a half-moon cut in the door, but perhaps have forgotten.

“The settlers in the Smokies, and everywhere, had to get other buildings up before the outhouse, so they simply went out in the woods behind a tree or bush. Some men were so lazy and shiftless that years passed before they built one.

“A favorite prank at Halloween was to push people’s outhouses over, sometimes with someone inside. Another prank, anytime of the year, was to find someone in an over-the-branch-outhouse and to throw a large flat rock at an angle against the water flowing under it, causing a spray of water to wet the rear of the one in the outhouse, a sort of mountain bidet.”

For the time being, insofar as I can determine, Duane’s letter would seem to be the definitive word on this topic.

(George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 287713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.)

 

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