Grandpa and the Outhouse

My great great grandmother was the first white woman in Minden and the town council deeded her a half acre from a corner of the community fair grounds. They also built her a four-room clapboard house, no electricity and no plumbing.

When I was a small child, we went to live with my grandparents for a while. At that point they were living in the home built by the town and had added a small barn, a henhouse, a tractor shed and a trap shed as well as an open smithy area. The outhouse was on it's own a short dash from the back door. There was still no electricity and the water had to be bailed from the dug well across the road, where my grandfather's sister and her husband lived.

When the community decided to install more modern bathroom facilities for the fair grounds, my grandfather loaded the old one on a drag and the old horse towed it home. It had a door at each end and the men's and ladies were separated by a central partition. After installing it at the far end of the trap shed, he built a long covered hallway from the front of the shed along the side to the ladies entrance so that my grandmother could go to the outhouse without getting wet in the rain. The men were made of heartier stuff and were expected to brave the elements and use the men's door.

This in the beginning of the era when houses all came with electricity and indoor plumbing! It struck me as odd at the time, but I came to understand that although they could not afford electricity and there was no water to be had on the property, my taciturn grandfather loved my grandmother very much and would do all in his power to make her life easier (with the exception of what he considered women's work).