There are two outhouses in the background [one is in the upper left-hand corner of the photo and one is directly behind the little girl]. This photo was part of the collection that was given to me by my dad. I treasure it because it subtly catalogs an almost-forgotten and often-overlooked aspect of daily living in the Hills where my family lived: the outhouse. The little girl is Elizabeth, Aunt Jenny's daughter.

"When I was a boy, the outhouse was about 20-to-30 feet away from the back of the house we lived in. It had one hole. Some people had two holes. Sometimes the holes were round and sometimes you had a square hole. The roof was covered with tar paper so it didn't leak. There was a button on the outside of the door to keep the door closed. There wasn't a lock on the inside. You didn't need a lock. [For toilet paper] ... we sometimes had newspaper if we bought the newspaper. Most of the time we had catalogs in there and would tear out a page and use that. Usually, it was an old Sears and Roebuck catalog. If we didn't have any newspaper or catalogs, we used corn shucks. Boy, were those rough! At night, we didn't usually go to the outhouse, but if we did we took an oil lamp or a candle. Later on, we had flashlights to take with us."

"Outhouses didn't have foundations. The building just sat on top of the ground over the hole. You'd just dig a hole about five feet deep and move the outhouse on top of the hole. When the hole started getting full, you'd just dig another hole and move the outhouse over to the new hole and cover up the old hole. Some people had wood floors in their outhouse, but when I was a boy, we didn't have a wood floor. The floor was the dirt. If you had the money, you could buy the wood to build a floor. Some people bought Red Dog Lye to put in the hole to keep it from smelling bad. Sometimes we did that. But that was after I was growing up."

"When we were kids, sometimes, if somebody was in the outhouse a long time, the kids would throw rocks at it to get them to come out. That's what they mean when somebody says 'rockin the outhouse' ... throwing rocks at it to get somebody to come out."

"On one Halloween night, there were a bunch of boys out tricker-treating and there was a man who didn't want kids coming to his house for candy. So he'd shoot his gun to scare the boys away. So the boys hid in the bushes and waited for the man to go to his outhouse. When he got in there, the boys snuck up and buttoned him in so he couldn't get out. Then they turned the outhouse over on him."

"My cousin, Geraldine, caught me and my other cousin ... I can't remember if it was Cousin Billy or Cousin George Steveson ... she caught us smoking in the outhouse at school. I think it was during recess or it could have been dinner time. She was mad at us for something, but I can't remember what for. But she buttoned us into the outhouse and ran and told the teacher that the outhouse was on fire. We got in trouble for it. I was about ten or eleven years old. Geraldine, Billy, and George were Aunt Sadie's [CanSada Graham Steveson] and Bethel Steveson's children."

"My first memory of indoor plumbing was there at my own house in John's Branch. I put it in myself and it was built on part of the back porch. That was around 1949 or 1950."

Frank Cyphers

(This mountain memory was told to and transcribed by Benita Cyphers; June 16, 1999).

[Gail Spradling's outhouse memories were received and added on August 4, 2007.]

[Mr. Barker's outhouse memory was received and added on September 3, 2000.]