Digging It

I can remember having to use outhouses when I was a child. My father Carl Beck bought a small house nearly halfway between Indian Head and Normalville, Pennsylvania. The house had a kitchen, two bedrooms, a partial basement/coal cellar, a living room and a path… that led back to the brown Insulbrick single seat privy. There was water to the kitchen and partial basement from a spring located on a hillside three hundred yards away.

The lack of plumbing was a normal scenario in the mountains of southwest Pennsylvania at the time. After enlarging the house, I can remember my dad digging the pit to receive the concrete septic tank. It was about six feet wide eight feet long and eight feet deep, all hand dug by mattock and spade. When the tank was delivered and set into place dad dug the sewer line to a nearby stream to handle the runoff. He attached the pipe from the newly installed commode to the tank after breaking through the cinderblock wall of the coal bin and passing the pipe to the tank outside.

We were in business. There were no more dodging raindrops, no more treks through the snow or frozen hineys, no more flies and bees, and a lot less smell with which to deal.

I can also remember my grandparents, Ray and Rebecca Miner’s outhouse. It was a two seater, one larger and one smaller. It wouldn’t do to have a kid fall through the opening. Grandma became older and decided she no longer wanted to make the jaunt to the privy or to use the “slop jar” stored beneath the bed. She talked granddad into indoor plumbing.

They had water to the kitchen via a pump in the basement from the springhouse, but no bathtub or commode. The best place for the septic tank was near the house where foot traffic and an occasional farm wagon compressed the earth. Digging was much harder there, but it was the most reasonable place for it. Uncles came and by taking turns, they used picks, mattocks, and spades to create the hole for the concrete holding tank. Sweat dripped from the men as they labored. I wasn’t there when the tank was delivered, but Grandma was very happy when it arrived.