Privies, Old & New

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One of the very first and most important buildings needed on a remote homestead is a privy . . . which isn't as comlicated to construct and maintain as you might have imagined. Both the surface privy and the pit outhouse (see illustrations in the Image Gallery) are simple, straightforward and easy to understand. As long as you follow the general rules, you can hardly go wrong modifying either type to suit your own particular materials, skill or location .

A properly managed privy is at least as healthful for people and land as a septic system and is far more than a place to evacuate waste. Ours is a sanctuary in which to be quiet with no one to ask why you aren't busy . . . to think or read with no one waiting to get in to shave . . . to watch a small, pretty piece of the day pass outside (one of the clapboards on our outhouse has a crack that's perfect for viewing through, like Arctic sunglasses). It's a place where body and self are at peace with the rest of the natural world.

Old homestead backhouses were typically screened by a spreading lilac and "going out to smell the lilacs" has long been a useful euphemism in our family. Our antique accommodation was also christened "The Reading Room" by my father for its quantity of old catalogs and magazines and it is next to impossible—while selecting a page of the right texture — not to get interested in an article from an old OHIO FARMER or SATURDAY REVIEW.

To make a page useful beyond (its own printed) words, we always crush and roll it in our hands. That softens the paper and distributes pressure. Even slick, colored pages can be made fairly efficient and safe this way. Newspapers are better aged until the ink is thoroughly dry and old telephone books are splendid. For that matter, no one will disqualify you for using commercial toilet paper in an outhouse. It doesn't provide much in the way of reading matter but it is comfortable and does disintegrate rapidly.

I suppose open-pit privies are necessary for the great numbers of people who visit parks and other remote locations but I find such designs disagreeable. Our old Reading Room located on a gentle hillside of sandy loam and is kept healthy by earth, air, bacteria and regular doses of ashes or lime.

Wood ashes are best and, if every use of an outhouse is topped by a cupful of them, the building will always have sweet earth smell with never an odor. Coal and trash ashes are almost as good. Superfine agricultural quicklime does a fair job too . . . if you don't mind the strong smell of lime hover around.