Water Closets

The 1856 guide to designing and furnishing “American village homes” also declared that “Health, comfort and decency, all demand that every dwelling, however humble, should have a water-closet under its roof, accessible with ease and without exposure to the external air.” Installing a toilet was simple if the dwelling had running water and drainage but took more care and cost if not. Essential for any indoor toilet was a chimney pipe to draw the foul smells away from the dwelling. Where indoor toilets were not yet provided, there were outhouses (also referred to as privies, necessary houses, and back houses). Trips to the outhouse at all hours and in inclement weather were unnecessary when a chamber pot or a night pot served its purpose.

A study of rented tenements in Boston in the early 1890s found that in the city as a whole, 91.9 percent of families had access to water closets, and the rest (8.1 percent) had access only to privies. The different wards of the city showed considerable diversity: in three wards more than 99 percent of the families had access to water closets while in another ward 35 percent had access only to privies. Access to a water closet was not always exclusive: in one ward as many as eighteen families shared one, and in two wards as few as four families shared one. We may assume that thirty years earlier, water closets were substantially less prevalent. They also would have been less common in less built-up areas. Frederick Law Olmsted, in recounting his travels in Texas in the 1850s, told a story (probably apocryphal) of a German gentleman who settled in a town in Texas and built a “water-closet” (almost certainly an outhouse). Nothing like it existed in town. He was assailed for indecency, and his water closet disappeared at night. He built another, and it too disappeared. Persisting, he built a third. It remained, and two or three others appeared in town. Several months later, 12 or 15 water-closets stood in a line beside the public square.