The Vanishing American Outhouse: Privy Plans, Photographs, Poems and Folklore

by Ronald S. Barlow

Softcover, 9" x 12", 138 pages, in good condition.

City dwellers often associate outhouses with the hillbilly era of the Hatfields and McCoys. However, the fact is that even as we write these words there are at least four million old-fashioned privies doing business in backyards from Maine to California. Of course this is not anywhere near the fifty million "unplumbed households" reported in the 1950 census, but we have put a man on the moon since then.

At the turn of the century James Whitcomb Riley wrote a classic poem entitled The Old Backhouse (which he did not sign), and in 1929 a vaudeville actor named Charles Sale published a best seller called The Specialist. Prior to the works of these pioneering penmen, nothing on the subject had been recorded in the annals of American literature.

Not only had the topic of privies been verboten in mixed company, but the very sight of a backhouse was objectionable to many in our post Victorian era. This is one reason why many well-meaning preservationists often demolished outhouses on historical sites before any architectural surveys could be undertaken. Thus, scores of perceptive school children on field trips to these sites invariably ask the same question, "Where did all the people who lived here go to the bathroom?"