Per reader request, over the next few days I’ll be reposting mini chapter excerpts — primarily illustrations– from a longer read about the evolution of outhouses and public utilities specific to Gloucester, Massachusetts, Privy to Privy History, on Good Morning Gloucester June 6, 2021.
Catherine Ryan, Aug. 2021
Gloucester housing stock (and hotels) included luxury homes with bathrooms and water closets as well as modest solutions. Rough outhouses were common, too. Can you spot the outhouses downtown and in East Gloucester?
(Reminder about the photographs: you can pinch and zoom to enlarge and right click for descriptions. Some media offer the option to “increase file size”.)
Gloucester – Victorian Age outhouses
1930 – 1941 American outhouses – cross county photos
photographs outhouses across America – Library of Congress
- Cincinnati row houses with backyard outhouses, 1930s
- privy plant pre cast base, Missouri, by Lee Russell, 1938
- Placing concrete in form for privy slab, MN, by Shipman, 1941, Library of Congress (collection FSA Office of War Info)
- South family’s shaker style privy, Harvard, Worcester County, MA 1930s
- General Israel Putnam Privy, Brooklyn, CT after storm
- Arlington, MA, Walker Evans 1930s
- Privy Monterey, Delaware, circa 847
- Washington DC “slum” privy, Carl Mydans, 1935
- “old six hole privy, Wiggins Tavern”, Northampton, MA, Lee Russell, 1939
photographs Indoor bathrooms residential and public – New York Public Library
Good Morning Gloucester 