Our Curator’s Show Part II included not only the displays of artifacts inside, but also, outside, a tour of the Woodside Cemetery’s veterans’ graves and a (tongue in cheek) tour of the two outhouses behind the Museum. While outhouses, also called necessaries and, locally, backhouses are well known to many of our older residents, they were a revelation to the ORR students who visited on a field trip.
The first outhouse is thought to have been built 500 years ago as a sanitary improvement over latrines and other open pits. As late as the 1930’s and 40’s, the U.S. government was actively encouraging homes in rural America to construct outhouses. During the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the replacing of dilapidated outhouses was one of the many WPA projects. Given $5.00 and 20 hours, the workers could build an outhouse that had proper ventilation, privacy and flooring.
Looking through the Rochester Journals, there is mention of family outhouses with three to five holes (some smaller for children) and the whole family would make a nightly trek out to the” necessary”. The Sears Catalogue pages often took the place of toilet paper (hopefully none of us had to resort to that during “the great pandemic toilet paper shortage”). Outhouses were often set 50 to 100 feet behind the home, making for a cold walk in the winter.
Behind the Museum there are 2 two- holers, one for women and one for men. They lack the sun or moon sometimes carved in the doors. The sun meant it was for males and the moon for women. There are no longer pits under our outhouses which were used during the church’s active years. The men’s side, however, does have a zinc lined urinal. While most of us consider outhouses as relics from a distant past, they were in use for many years after the invention of the flush toilet. Besides the ones at Snows Pond, now replaced by “porta-potties”, I remember taking a nighttime trip out to one during a cousins’ sleepover in the late 1950’s at Aunt Mary Nute’s house. Many former students recall the “backhouses” at the Waterman School. In fact, the East Rochester Church outhouses were in use until a bathroom was installed in the basement of the church in 1968. A welcome addition, I am sure. One last outhouse story from a poem by Hilda Nevius Peirce:
Each Halloween night some hi-jackers
The Woman’s Club privy would borrow,
Whoever had irked those sly hackers,
Could expect a gift house on the morrow.”
By Connie Eshbach
I got a kick out of your article about outhouses. Never heard about the sun & moon: male and female designations before. It is common to see the crescent moon in cartoon representations of outhouses. I started first grade in 1952 in an old school adjacent to where they built Rochester Memorial School. We had to use outhouses. By second grade the new school was completed. My grandfather, Albert Humphrey, considered himself unofficial ‘clerk of the works’ while the school was being built. Having grown up with outhouses as ‘standard use’ he wasn’t a big fan of the need for indoor toilets. As a 6 or 7 year old I welcomed them heartily. By the way, we had an indoor toilet at home!
Allan Humphrey