Hey Tug, where you going with that Sears catalog?

As I have mentioned numerous times, we weren’t the most well off family in Knox County. For the first 8-years of my life, we lived in a tiny 4-room cinder block house with a flat roof. We did not have indoor plumbing, so our bathroom was located about 75-yards behind our home, in a little wooden outhouse. My generation is probably the last in this area to be familiar with outside toilets. I’d say we were the very last folks in our neighborhood that had one.

If you do not know anything about outhouses, let me fill you in a bit…

An outhouse is simply a small closed in shelter that sits over the top of a deep hole. It’s always made of wood and has a tin roof. The size doesn’t vary much. They are normally about 4 foot x 4 feet wide, 8-feet tall with a slanted tin roof on top. The front consists of a large wooden door with a big closer spring on it and a latch to hold the door to. Inside you will find a wooden or dirt floor and a homemade toilet, which was normally just a square wood structure that stood about 2-feet off of the ground and there would be a round hole cut out in the center for you to sit on. Some fancy folks would buy a real toilet seat and put over the hole but not us, we weren’t fancy. Ours was just the cutout hole. Every now and then we would have real toilet paper, however, there was usually a stack of newspapers or old catalogs in the outhouse to do your business with. I can remember being just about 6 or 7 years old and flipping through the Sears & Roebuck catalog and giggling at the pictures of ladies wearing girdles.

The outhouse wasn’t all that bad for us boys, but the girls detested those things. I suppose it’s because they always had to sit or hover, where as we normally just stood, depending on whether we had to do number one, two, or heaven forbid, number three. The thing I disliked the most about the outside toilet was the ever-present red wasps in the summertime. I would always approach the outhouse with caution. Looking up at the cracks in the roof for a nest or a buzzing wasper. I remember one time not paying attention and when I reached out to open the door, one stung me on the hand. Man, those things hurt! Dirt daubers also built nests in the outhouse but they didn’t sting, so they weren’t a bother.

One thing that you always wanted to make sure of was to do your business before the sun went down. There is nothing worse than sitting in an outhouse in the dark. It would be so dark that you could barely see your hand in front of your face, and of course a spider or something would decide to crawl out from under the toilet and do a 40-yard dash across your hind-end. I’ve left the old wooden seat many a time in a full scream, slapping at my backside. I never saw a snake in the toilet but I had heard of that happening and it was always a constant fear of mine. So I tried to make sure that I visited the outhouse while it was still daylight.

My dad used to tell stories of how he and his buddies would throw rocks at the outhouse at church, trapping someone inside. He also told of turning outhouses over while someone was doing their business. I always wanted to try that but was always too scared of the punishment that I would be sure to receive in return. I’m sure my dad wouldn’t have found it as funny if I had done it.

I remember one time when we filled up the hole underneath the outhouse. As you can imagine, the smell was disgusting, especially in the hot months of July and August. We had to hire someone to come out with a backhoe and dig us a new hole in the ground. Then we had to relocate the toilet over the top of the new hole. It wasn’t very long after that, when in 1974, we finished our new Jim Walter home. It had two bathrooms! Boy, we thought we were something then! I would go to the bathroom even when I didn’t need to. The sound of a toilet flushing was like Heaven to my ears. There are a lot of things that I miss about my childhood, but I’ve got to say that I don’t miss that old outhouse one single bit.

If for some strange reason you feel compelled to build yourself an outhouse, I ran across some nifty blueprints for you here: OUTHOUSE PLANS