Councillors get in shouting match over outhouse LeithLeith KnightPublished on August 06, 2010 In the spring of 1883, Moose Jaw was a noisy little town filled with hammering and sawing from daybreak to sunset as the first settlers built their houses and backyard necessities such as stables, barns and outhouses. Moose Jaw settlers were encouraged to construct “earth closets,” a fancy name for an outhouse, the back of which was placed over a pit of no fixed depth. Owners moved the outhouses now and again by digging a new pit beside the old, then moving the structure and filling in the old hole with the newly dug soil. Dr. A.R. Turnbull, Moose Jaw’s turn-of-the-century health officer, knew that most of the town’s ills stemmed from the lack of any sort of sewage system, and unless the town council forced people to clean up their backyards, outbreaks of typhoid, diphtheria and scarlet fever would continue to be a periodic scourge. In January 1901, when diphtheria showed signs of becoming rampant, Turnbull went to the town council. “Sanitation in Moose Jaw is in a deplorable condition,” he told councillors. “The inspection of outbuildings and yards is practically nil, and slops and refuse from kitchens and bedrooms are being thrown into backyards.” Turnbull asked council to outlaw primitive pit outhouses and convert to pail privies. If the town provided pails and collected the excrement weekly, the disposal would be “simple, economical and comply with most sanitary requirements.” He wanted to see manure from the numerous livery and feed stables, which usually sat uncollected for weeks, removed daily, and a weekly inspection of all yards and outbuildings. Gradually the epidemic of 1901 subsided, but the general state of health in Moose Jaw never did show signs of improvement until the first sewer and water mains were laid in 1904 and settlers built more substantial dwellings with running water and flush toilets. Up to the Second World War, pail outhouses continued to grace hundreds of Moose Jaw backyards and provoked many a row in city council. Probably the biggest and noisiest of the back-house battles took place in October 1920. It all started when Mr. Smith (not his real name) who lived in the 1200 block of Grafton Avenue, was about to be taken to court by the city’s health department for failing to install indoor plumbing when ordered to do so. In a letter to council Smith said he simply could not afford the plumbing, at least not right away; there had been a lot of illness in his family which had created financial difficulties. He wanted council to drop the court action and give him a little more time to make the changeover. Ald. Bob Jackson, sympathetic to Smith’s predicament, was furious with the council’s health department for taking the matter to court without first consulting council. He said that since none of the neighbours had complained about Smith’s outhouse, council should withdraw the charge and grant the extension. At this point Mayor Sam Hamilton rose to say there had been a complaint and he had made it, and in spite of Smith’s litany of woes, he had no intention of withdrawing it. Smith’s outhouse, he said, was almost directly across the back alley from his own property on Third Avenue. In order to service the privy, the night soil wagon had to pass the mayor’s house and he was not putting up with the nuisance any longer. The mayor’s revelation left council speechless, which was merely the quiet before the storm. The shouting started when Aldermen Jackson and Ben Fletcher jumped to their feet to say that they were “bitterly opposed to city authorities working a hardship on any citizen” and anyone who did was nothing but a high-handed dictator. “The electors of Moose Jaw elected 10 aldermen,” yelled Jackson, “and not 10 little czars.” Finally, when the tumult and the shouting died, Smith found city council had given him until spring to get rid of his outhouse, ending the need for the night soil wagon to darken the mayor’s back lane. Today, some outhouse sites are sought out by archaeologists. At Last Mountain House, an 1869 fur trade outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Qu’Appelle Valley northeast of Moose Jaw, archaeologists have retrieved, from the outhouse site, 198 artifacts. These included pieces of Copeland tableware, glassware fragments, bottles that once contained Perry Davis Pain Killer (a popular remedy in the 19th century), clay pipes, coloured trade beads, a harness bell, earrings, gun parts, an auger, files, awls and other treasures. According to one archaeologist, “privies are now time capsules.”
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 15:36:15 +0000
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