FREEPORT — Cindy Lafrienier, who shares a Bustins Island cottage with her three brothers, was outvoted 3-1 on the issue of plumbing. Thus the cottage's new flush toilet. "I wanted things the old way," says Lafrienier, who still laments the obsolescence of the cottage's old outhouse.
A water tank now sits in the idle shack. Elsewhere on this island, as in rural communities all over Maine, outhouses have become storage sheds for fishing tackle, boating equipment and garden tools. They have been knocked over. They have collapsed.
Flies, hornets and creepy spiders may not like the news, but it is so. Maine's outhouses are vanishing.
The number of year-round homes without complete plumbing fixtures declined by 40 percent between 1990 and 2000, according to new figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau. The percentage of homes with incomplete plumbing declined from 1.6 percent to 0.9 percent.
"There will come a time," warns Nancy Rudolph, who still uses her outhouse on Bustins Island, "when no living people will have any memory of any outhouse at all."
Outhouses seem to inspire more sentimentality as fewer people use them. Gift shops stock outhouse postcards. Poets and songwriters celebrate them.
One gift shop item, a poem printed on fake parchment, reminisces about the strong smell that "filled the evening breezes so full of homely cheer and told the night-o'ertaken tramp that human life was near." People typically hang the poem in their modern, thoroughly disinfected bathrooms.
The outhouse has been in a precipitous decline for more than a century, and the decline is accelerating, in Maine and across the United States.
Half the houses in the United States lacked plumbing in 1940, when the Census Bureau began keeping plumbing records. By 2000, only 0.64 percent of U.S. households did not have a flush toilet, a shower or bathtub, and hot and cold piped water.
The tiny fraction of houses that lack plumbing are found in places that are too rocky or remote to accommodate it. Sometimes, their owners can't afford plumbing. Other owners, though, simply will not have it.
In Maine, houses without plumbing are typically located in poor, rural communities, and islands with limited water supplies.
According to the census, 4,468 housing units in Maine lacked complete plumbing fixtures in 2000, putting the state near the top of the most-primitive list. Only Kentucky, West Virginia, Hawaii, Arizona, New Mexico and Alaska had a greater percentage of homes without plumbing.
Had the census counted camps and summer homes as well as year-round homes, Maine likely would rival Alaska as having the highest number of houses without plumbing. That means Maine, as far as outhouses go, could be number one or number two in the nation.
Outhouses come in a variety of architectural styles - one-holers, two-holers, even an eight-holer at a lumber camp near Allagash Lake. Double-decker outhouses were popular in places like Maine because, in deep snow, the second story still could be reached.
But the advance of indoor plumbing is an indomitable and irresistible force, even in Maine. Since 1990, more than 3,000 year-round homes that did not have complete plumbing have joined the ranks of those that do.
In the mid-1990s, the community of Pownal tore down a two-story outhouse attached to its town hall. It used the salvaged lumber to make Christmas tree ornaments and refrigerator magnets. Around the same time, the town of Poland tore down the two-story outhouse that had served municipal employees well since 1908. (The upper chamber was for women, and the lower for men.)
In a two-story outhouse, for the uninitiated, the upper hole is offset from the lower hole so that the waste passes safely on the way down.
An outhouse's rustic charm gets old after a while, says Marilyn Carr. She installed plumbing shortly after buying her home on Bustins Island. Her sister, Jan Eckel, however, remains committed to her 91-year-old outhouse. Hers even has crocodile eyes painted on its toilet seat lid, and crocodile teeth painted underneath.
Outhouses are low-maintenance, Eckel says. They use no water, which is a precious commodity on this rocky island, located off the coast of Freeport. Outhouses also have no water pipes that could freeze in the off-season.
Besides the scarcity of water, there are no electric lines on the summer colony, and nobody lives here in winter. Those factors make Bustins Island a sanctuary for the endangered outhouse.
But even on this tradition-bound island, technological innovation has proven irresistible.
Twenty years ago, about 80 percent of the homes on Bustins Island used outhouses. That figure has dropped to 60 percent today, according to one of Maine's foremost authorities on outhouses, Ron Sweatt.
Wealthy newcomers, he says, demand the convenience of indoor plumbing and are willing to barge tons of gravel to the island and create leach fields for their engineered septic systems.
"For a person making $150,000 a year," he says, "the thought of an outhouse is repulsive." Sweatt has been cleaning Bustins' outhouses for 42 years. "All people care about is, 'Get rid of it,' " he says. "That's my job."
The lowly outhouse, Sweatt says, has proven over time to be the safest, easiest and cheapest way of disposing of human waste on this crowded island. Once or twice a year, Sweatt removes the waste from each outhouse and buries it in on a site in the middle of the island. Many islanders get loam from that area for gardens. He charges $35 to $135 for the service.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, men like Sweatt were known as "night soil men" because they would usually dig up the waste from city outhouses and remove it at night. They were also called "honey men," "honey dippers" and "scavengers."
In Victorian times, when bodily functions were a source of embarrassment, people used euphemisms for the shack behind the house. People gave them names, such as "Mrs. Murphy," as in, "I'm going to see Mrs. Murphy."
They also called it the "privy," "throne," "palace," "comfort station," "castle," "post office," "johnny," "stool," "doolie," "white house," "hut," "the WC," "the ajax," "the bog house" and "the defecatorium," according to Virginia Williams, a Rhode Island woman who is one of New England's leading experts on outhouses.
Before outhouses, people in rural areas simply used a hole in the ground, according to Williams, who calls herself "the outhouse lady." As neighborhoods become more populated, they erected shacks for privacy. Earlier outhouses, she says, had deep pits of up to 15 or 20 feet.
Some outhouses built over shallower pits were mobile, allowing the owners to relocate them once a hole became filled up with material. Some even had wheels. Wealthy people built outhouses that matched the architectural style of their homes.
Williams says women typically used outhouses, while the men used barns. It was once considered unmanly to use outhouses.
Doors on the outhouses always opened in, Williams says, preventing an embarrassing moment if the occupant had forgotten to latch the door. Fences often surrounded outhouses to allow women to slip in without being noticed. Also, there was a woodpile nearby, so women could pretend to be getting wood when seen going to the outhouse.
The humble outhouse now is drawing attention from folklorists and historians. At least one Maine outhouse, a double-decker connected to Bridgewater Town Hall in Aroostook County, has earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. Archaeologists are digging up old privies to learn about the diets and habits of earlier generations.
Many communities outside of Maine have banned outhouses. The Maine plumbing code, however, recognizes outhouses as primitive wastewater disposal systems that can be erected on any site that meets the same setback requirements and soil standards required for a septic system.
Those erected before 1974, when stricter codes were enacted, are allowed to remain as long as they don't cause any problems, says Russell Martin, program director for the state's wastewater and plumbing control program. Martin added that state officials aren't going around looking at outhouses, and that nobody has a handle on exactly how many there are in Maine.
Williams, the outhouse expert, says privies work as well as toilets, and it's a shame that their numbers are dwindling. For many older people, she says, the outhouse stands as a symbol of a more innocent and less hurried time in their lives. And the buildings themselves, which can be opulent or simple, say a lot about the people who used them.
"They are delightful little structures," she says.
The outhouse has earned a following among those who believe that the elimination of human waste is best practiced outdoors.
Karyn Zywiec and Lars Jansson still miss the privy they used for more than 20 years when they lived on Long Island. The couple recently moved to Gilead in Maine's western mountains. Although their new house has a flush toilet, Jansson still goes outside to do number one, since flushing a toilet seems like such a waste of water. Zywiec said she can't start the day without taking a short walk outdoors.
"I still go outside the first thing in the morning," she says, "no matter what the weather, to clear my head and see what the day feels like."
The couple plans to build a new outhouse soon.
Staff Writer Tom Bell may be reached at 791-6369 or at:
tbell@pressherald.com
