Outhouses on the Island - January 29, 2012

It was a lovely day at the dog park. We slept in, all of the mammals in the house. I'd been out dancing until 1:30 am, so I at least had an excuse. Anyway, as I said it was picture-perfect at the dog park, and it was crawling with canines.

I talked about plumbing with my dad on Friday. He grew up, from the summer he was eight until the family moved to Dallas in 1942, when he was fifteen, in a house with an outhouse. I think by the time they moved back, two years later, the house was at least on a septic system. I'm not sure when the neighborhood got hooked up to city sewer.

And he said it was just a matter-of-fact part of life. When it was fearsomely cold, there were chamber pots you could do your business in and then take yourself and your goods out to dump them in the outhouse. And of course it smelled. You dumped lime in and it smelled less bad, but still.

One thing I wondered was if it was kind of a mark of class to have an outhouse, and he said he didn't have that sense as a child—everyone had an outhouse. Oddly, his earliest years were spent as the caretaker's family at a church retreat center not far away, and there he is pretty sure they had indoor plumbing with a septic field.

I think maybe at the time (1930's and 1940's) it was more of a city-country thing than the rich/poor thing I think outhouses have come to be. I wonder about the growth of flush septic systems, what the timing was on them, and how they represented a kind of class line out in the countryside.

Island Park, Minnesota, where Dad grew up, was not really out in the country; it was a village, made up of summer homes and all-year residents like my grandparents. Grandpa worked all kinds of jobs in the 1930's, both out in the area and in Minneapolis, and elsewhere around the state, until he got a civil service job in 1942 (that's what took them to Dallas). My dad went to the Spring Park Elementary and then the Mound Public schools by school bus, but this was not farm country. The farm kids were from Minnetrista.

Back to sewers. An interesting teaser in the form of a PowerPoint slide set from North Carolina suggests a couple things: (1) Septic tanks developed in the 1860's, (2) World War I-era efforts to regulate privies, based in part on the fact that hookworms can travel 300 feet from privy to any water supply, (3) some sort of campaign to improve privies as part of the WPA in the 1930's, (4) post-WWII marketing of indoor plumbing to rural families as part of rural electrification.

By contrast, Minneapolis had a city sewer system well in place by the 1890's. Even up on the edges of development like our house in Northeast, I'm pretty sure there was a hookup within a decade of the house's construction in 1890. I'd like to see a history of where the city sewer extended. It would make an interesting time-sequence map.

The dramatic shift I can report was the consolidation of local sewer systems around 1970. Apparently there were a lot of smaller local systems in the Twin Cities suburbs, and many of these were failing, and a lot of untreated or undertreated sewage ended up in the Mississippi. So the current set up where most of the Twin Cities' sewage goes to Pig's Eye Island on the other side of St Paul, dates from that era. This map shows how the regional consolidation of sewage treatment has covered most of the metro area.