In the scheme of things, the modern indoor bathroom is fairly recent. When I was a kid, the outhouse was located about 100 feet from the house beside the sidewalk that went out to the south fence. It sat beside the "coal house" where coal and cobs were stored to be burned in the pot bellied stove that sat in our living/dining room.We had a two holer with lids. Some people only had one holers. Never did figure out why there were two holes. We never shared the "bench" with each other. Guess we did have a choice which one we used, though.
The lids really didn't help much. Maybe it kept the flies down? kept the stink in? I don't THINK SO!!
I remember daddy digging a new hole next to the other one. He'd move the toilet over the few feet and used the dirt from the new hole to fill in the old hole. WHEW it wasn't so bad for a few days!
We did have a chamber pot under the bed in the wintertime, just because it was so far to run in the dark and it took so long to get warm again!
This picture of Ray Ruggles beside the last "standing" outhouse was taken on a country tour of our corner of Cheyenne county a couple of years or so ago. This particular outhouse was where the Richerts lived in the 1950s on the corner of Parks Road and County Road 891 (BB) southeast of Haigler. The last time I was by there, all evidence of a farmstead has been erased.
(Boyd, Barber, Reichert Place)
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