Review by Ed Quillen
Rural Life – December 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
Out the back, down the path – Colorado Outhouses
by Kenneth Jessen
Published in 2002 by J.V. Publications
ISBN 1-928656-03-X
AS IT FADES FROM THE Colorado landscape, the humble privy gets more attention: calendars, magazine articles, and now, an attractive and informative book which is also entertaining. The privy has both an architectural history and a social history, and they’re intertwined. Americans have a sense of privacy about certain bodily functions that some other cultures don’t possess, and that caused the construction of a private zone.
Just how it was constructed could vary considerably, and thus this book celebrating the diversity of Colorado’s outhouse construction, from the short-grass prairie to the foothills, into the mountains, and over into the canyon and plateau country.
Wood was the preferred material, for a practical reason. Outhouses sit over pits, and over time, the pit fills up. (One privy in the Cripple Creek district got around that problem by sitting over an old mine shaft that went down hundreds of feet.) If the outhouse stays in place — pretty much a given if it’s made of brick or stone — then the pit has to be mucked out, a job that was worse than unpleasant.
With a wood structure, though, you can just dig a new pit when the old one is full, move the privy to the new location, and toss some dirt in the old pit — which becomes a fertile garden spot. Some privies even had a hoisting ring on top.
Most were rather plain, as one might expect of a building that was usually hidden from casual view, but some sport gaudy paint jobs and decoration beyond the crescent. Those at railroad stations were generally of a standard design, but a few private structures were custom designed by architects.
The most common surviving design, though, resulted from the Great Depression, when the federal government assisted with new privies, especially on plains farmsteads. The householder paid for the materials (about $35 for a one-holer), and the WPA provided the plans and the labor. It put people to work, and advanced the cause of sanitation while discouraging “promiscuous defecation.”
Even though lumber was pretty much the standard, the copious illustrations (mostly photos) in Colorado Outhouses show that they were built out of anything that was at hand: logs, bricks, stone, even corrugated iron, which must have been brutally hot in the summer, viciously chilling in the winter, and deafening in a hail storm. I wondered if there were any adobe privies, and there’s a picture of an outhouse at Viejo San Acacio that might be adobe, but the text doesn’t say. Since adobe would have the same mobility problems as brick or stone when the pit filled, however, I suspect they were rare.
NOT ALL OUTHOUSES had pits. Where the soil was too rocky to dig deep, removable collection boxes were sometimes used. Or where there was just rock, as at the Mary Murphy Mine near St. Elmo, the privy sat on the hillside with a small bridge to it, and beneath it was a wooden box structure that went down six or eight feet.
Colorado Outhouses is organized geographically, with each region getting a section. Inside the section, an outhouse or a cluster of them gets a page or two; there are photos, some lore about the location, and often, some details about the featured privy.
In our part of the world, the hexagonal outhouse at the old Interlaken Resort near Twin Lakes gets full treatment, along with the novel Outhouse Race at Leadville Boom Days. Also we can read about a log structure at Camp Cree, a Chaffee County ghost town; a picture of a long-gone six-sided domed privy in the Leadville suburb of Finntown; and a padlocked outhouse at Turret.
Once upon a time at Crystal Lakes, a one-time resort in the Leadville area, there was a country school with a large three-room privy in back. One side served girls, the other boys, and in the middle was the coal shed. Putting privies near the coal bin was common; those going about their errands could conveniently bring in some fuel, and saying “I’ll go get some coal” was a polite way to excuse oneself when nature called.
Here’s a short sample entry for Futurity:
“Located in a high meadow between Turret and Trout Creek Pass, Futurity is among the most obscure mining camps in Colorado. Many of its original cabins remain standing and are seasonally occupied. Miners had to walk only 100 feet or so to work since the mine sits almost in the middle of town. The geology of the area is similar to Turret to the south with pockets of gold ore in a granite formation.
“Current residents have posted a number of humorous signs on their cabins. Lacking indoor plumbing, outhouses are widely used.”
There are two photos, one of a relatively modern privy (plywood is the clue) and the other of a hand-painted outhouse sign that says “Futurity Hilton. No vacancy.”
MOST OF THE PRIVIES are in ghost towns. At first I figured that was because Jessen has written so much about ghost towns, so he’d focus there. But then I realized that privies tend to get replaced by indoor plumbing in active communities, so more outhouses survived in abandoned towns.
Jessen also traces the technological progression, from the unlined pits of yore to the sealed and vaulted structures now required by law in most counties, and into advanced composting technology. He’s not the only writer in this book — he includes a few essays from others (myself among them), as well as an engaging study of Great Plains privies by a geographer from the University of Northern Colorado.
My only problems with this book were more like annoyances. The horizontal format was sometimes inconvenient to handle (although the individual pages were handsome and readable), and it needed a little more editing to catch a few dangling modifiers that marred the text.
Those are just quibbles, though. This was informative and fun, and a new twist on Colorado’s architectural heritage and social morés. I won’t tell you which room you might want to read this one in, but it’s well worth reading — and it’s also one of those books that can simplify your holiday shopping.