The Appalachian Outhouse Part 1

Photo Courtesy of Barbara Woodall. The owners named it Mrs. Murphy.

First, I want to start this article out by thanking Mr. +Johnny Depp  for mentioning his mother, Appalachia and outhouses. Johnny Depp's Mother is An Appalachian? is one of my most well read blog posts. The stereotype of outhouses and Appalachia is so predominate in our country, it is sad that Mr. Depp's use and perceptions are the norm instead of the exception. A perception that needs to be changed if we are ever going to solve the problems we have in Appalachia. I am really thankful that his popularity and his just mentioning it, is giving us a basis to talk about it and be heard.

This is going to be a two part blog post. This first part is just a discussion of the reasons we have relied on this system in Appalachia. The second part will be some stories of Appalachian outhouses from my family and my experiences.

 I don't know why the outhouse stereotype is so prevalent for Appalachia when you could find an outhouse or something similar as a necessary function for crap in every part of the world at one time or another. I personally think it is because we have been relegated to use them in Appalachia longer than most places.   The same stereotype doesn't seem to exist on outhouses say in the Colorado Rockies or in the Midwest in the same way. The reasons this is true could be a research paper.

I think it is just the Appalachian region itself is so close to much more populated areas in the East that any unusual thing out of the "modern" ordinary, like an outhouse, especially when I was growing up, stood out like a boil on the butt of humanity in our region.  I was always upset as a child when those from outside the region would ridicule, stereotype, or tell us we are backwards just because in our region we had outhouses and did without modern plumbing for so long. My family, for the most part, did not see it that way.

Some say our people were just "too poor" in our region to get rid of outhouses and put in proper plumbing. Working in the field of Appalachian history for a living, it was amazing to come across this stigma of thought that even many of our older residents still suffer from the shame and the thinking of that stereotype. Yes... in some instances lack of money might have been true.

If we had enough money to throw at the problem we possibly could have solved all of Appalachia's plumbing problems long ago. After all we sent men to the Moon, so most definitely we could pour massive amounts of money into Appalachia to put in defying feats of engineering, creating septic systems in challenging, inaccessible places with low populations....if we had the money of say Dubai.  Some say we should have had those riches with all the coal we sold but let's not go there.

But those of us from here know that Appalachia is a special place in more ways than one. We understand the main reason for our failure to keep up our plumbing with the rest of the world, in the oldest mountains in the U.S., for so long, is because of the mountains geological make up and geography. Why should we ever feel ashamed of things really beyond our control?

Knowing this place as I do, I'm not so sure all the money in the world would buy a good system for some of these places in our mountains. In our area, we have a river that appears to defy gravity and flows North up the Appalachian mountain chain. The New River. I learned in economic development of our area it has a great BIG effect in how you engineer a system. Number one rule for a sewer or septic system, crap runs down hill and we are fighting a water shed that is defying that.

Explaining this to newcomers to our area has been amusing. I mention that in the "Gentrification of Appalachia" another blog post. This is where folks move to our beautiful mountains and it has been amusing to watch their demands for septic and water and trash pickup. Usually in areas that it would be an engineering feat to put in a septic system in the first place and secondly, the population won't support many of the systems they are used to having in larger flat land populated areas.

After owning and renting many homes over the years in Appalachia I know it has nothing to do with being poor. It has to do with working with what you have, where you are!!! Many of us were glad if we bought property that would "perk" and drain to put a septic system in. Never mind the life of those systems is around 20 to 30 years if you are lucky and creates other problems. Many of us were lucky that their area of Appalachia is an area where a town could locate a sewer system to cover many homes. Yet those systems have their own unique problems still.

Personally I know the problems we have are unique. Especially after paying to sink 3 different wells and knowing the water table dropping can turn your sweet water into iron or sulfur if you don't dig it extra deep enough to allow for extreme droughts. After living with septic systems that gave out after 10 years being hooked up to a public water supply system that destroyed them and paying to have them pumped on a regular basis.... I personally know it's not money that is the problem. It's LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!  Especially the soil in my neck of the woods is ROCK with clay, limestone, granite and more rock!!!  You would not believe the rock (actually small boulders) that came out of the ground while digging a 40 foot water line.

It is so serious a problem that a lack of access to good water and septic closes down our economic development in many areas. Yet Appalachians are really resilient and we get creative trying to solve these problems. We have a modern version of an outhouse that you would not know exists in many areas when you visit a bathroom at a modern business. It's called pump and haul. It's just a tank in the ground that you hire someone to pump and haul the contents to the closest sewer plant when it gets full. One business I worked for that haul was 40 miles away.

I was going to take a picture of one of my favorite little watering holes. It's a Cabin that is a bar called the "Bulls eye". They had outhouses out back. Found out in recent years they were forced to put a septic system in. Think it's pump and haul. Anyway their outhouses are now cinderblock mansions.

My point is we are fighting a stereotype that exists because of the geography of our mountainous hollers.  We should never be ashamed in this day and age for having an outhouse in any way.  Many modern situations still use outhouses in other areas of the country and the stereotype of Appalachians being backwards or ignorant because of our people ever used an outhouse needs to go AWAY!!! It's not true and never was.

 I love that you can find how to build and maintain one on the internet.

In Part II are my stories of our outhouse exploits.  The link is Appalachian Outhouse stories - Build it Downwind

Appalachian Outhouses Part 2 Stories - Build it Downwind of the House, Boys

Photo courtesy of Diane McHone Lloyd

For Part one click here. In Appalachia, one of the first rules I learned as a child was where to build an outhouse. I watched family find a good place down wind of the house.  Or up on the hill away from the house. Though it varied by family of where they would put their outhouse usually it was placed to avoid outhouse "smells". You could keep the aroma down by putting a cup of lime after each use or wood shavings and a vent but the best way to avoid smells leaking into the house was in where you built it. In warm weather you had to contend with flies, bees, snakes etc. I hated going to the bathroom during the day in the summer. I preferred early in the morning or late before dark in the evening. In the winter time there would not be any critters, it was just cold. Here are few of my outhouse stories.

Charlie the Black Snake

Grandpa Burress's outhouse was up on the hill and a long trek in the winter time. It was a two seat outhouse which I always found amusing. Two could use it at the same time. Probably because my grandmother and her sister would go together to the outhouse as children. It was moved a couple of times after so much use, but always on the same hillside above and to the right of the corncrib. My great grandmother would say learning to use an outhouse built character.  One of the most amusing stories about that outhouse were the visits from Charlie the black snake.

Grandpa Burress taught us never ever to kill a black snake or any non-poisonous snake. He said they kept the mice population down and when you killed the non-poisonous snakes the poisonous ones would move in. He would threaten to whip us if we bothered any black or non-poisonous snake on the property.

Charlie lived in the corn crib. He was about 6 feet long and was very familiar to us seeing him on the property. He'd be on the side of a tree or hanging down over the path or on the path just about every day. I always thought he was pretty smart.

But Charlie got too familiar with us for his own good. So much so that when he saw someone going to the outhouse he would actually climb down the wall of the corn crib and race you to the outhouse. Then he would poke his head through a hole at the bottom of the wall and literally scare the crap out of you!!  If there were screams coming from the outhouse, it was usually due to Charlie.

It got to be a game one summer to try to race the snake to the outhouse, do your business before he showed up. Sometimes he would be in there before you got there curled up on the bench and we would have to try to chase him off.

Grandma Burress tried to accommodate Grandpa's wishes until one day according to my Aunt, Little Betty Sue, Grandma had enough. Charlie coiled up to strike her and she went and got a hoe and chopped his head off. Grandma's reasoning was she was tired of fighting off a black snake every time she went to the bathroom. Grandpa didn't much like that she killed the snake, but it was grandma, and if grandma wasn't happy, no body was happy! I was glad Grandma did it because if it had been one of us, it would have been a strap to our backside!!

Terrance's Outhouse

Outhouses were not just in the country but in town too. The towns in Appalachia were built before sewer systems. In 1978 I lived in Bluefield WV in a house built in the 1890s. As a matter of fact the whole block was built before the modern sewer system was put in. Most of the houses were connected to the system in this block except one.

Terrance's house could not be hooked to the system because the old house was built on solid rock. To blast through that rock would have possibly damaged the house. They could get water to him from the block above him but they couldn't pump the sewage up hill to reach the line and there was no way to blast through the rock to get a line to the lower block. So he had an outhouse that they would pump and haul once a month. As a matter of fact Terrance told me the boys that pumped his outhouse, (what we called the "honey wagon") said there were many such houses still in town in the 70's. Because of the makeup of the ground and where these houses were located in town just could not be hooked to a modern system.

But Terrance's outhouse was a popular feature in the wintertime. Every cold spell about January or February everyone's water in those old houses would freeze when the temps dropped below zero for an extended amount of time. It was like clock work every year, sometimes lasting a week or more. The plumbing including the commodes would not work. So Terrance would charge folks 25 cents a day to use his outhouse to cover the pump and haul charge for that month. I can tell you when modern systems don't work, you appreciate the good old fashion systems that do!!

Today, just about every house on that block is gone and I would say they will not build where Terrance's house stood ever again because of the solid rock on that hillside.

The Adventure's of the Atwell Boys

I bet I could write a whole book on the adventures of my partner Eddie Atwell's family. I wrote a blog post for a book his son David Adam Atwell's wrote Appalachian Safari: A Virginia Mountain Man's tales about hunting, etc.  One of my favorite Atwell family stories is one of their outhouse tales.

Outhouse's are cold places in the wintertime. Unless you were like my friend C.C. who ran electricity for a heater and a light to hers.  Eddie and his brother had a habit of actually building a small fire on the floor in theirs in the wintertime out of the catalog pages when they were in the outhouse. They would then stamp the fire out before they left.

One morning, Ed and his brother were awakened by their father asking them,  "Which one of you damn boy's burnt down the outhouse?"  Seems their father went out to do his morning business and as he came around the wood pile, nothing was left of the outhouse but a smoldering hole.  They had their work cut out for them that day building a new one.

C.C's Outhouse
In the early 80's, I had a friend that lived in Floyd County, VA in a 1930's home. It had gravity flow water and an outhouse. The land would not "perk" to put a septic system in and it's remote location meant no town sewer service so that also was out of the question.

I took another friend to visit who had never used an outhouse in her life. But this one was quite made up.

This outhouse had a regular toilet seat, a red fuzzy seat warmer, a red rug, a framed picture on the wall, a magazine rack, a toilet paper holder and it had electricity ran to it for a light and a heater. The one who had never visited an outhouse was quite impressed.  These are pictures of the house and outhouse I'm including in this blog post.  Yes the fuzzy seat warmer is airing out.

The outhouse is to the left of the house in this picture. The car is a 1974 Trans AM 455 automatic. Could not pass a gas station it didn't like but would fly. The one in the foreground is what we called the "Falchero"  It was a Falcon that was made into a pick up truck and painted camo style.  Great to go hunting and bar hopping in.

That's it for my outhouse stories for now.

I welcome any comments and stories you may have of your own outhouse tales.