By the 1860s, nearly 200,000 people called Cincinnati home. Most of those inhabitants were packed into the downtown basin between the river and the surrounding hills, and all of them had to poop.

At the time, indoor plumbing was almost nonexistent. Sewers were an expensive innovation just beginning to catch on. Most Cincinnatians relieved themselves in unheated outhouses tucked away at the back of the property where they lived, and all of those outhouses perched over a deep and smelly pit known as a privy vault. The situation was every bit as disgusting as you can imagine. The Cincinnati Commercial Tribune [23 May 1859] opined:

“We have time and again warned the public of the danger accruing from dilapidated out-houses, beneath the worm eaten floors of which yawn the disgusting receptacle of a privy vault. Hardly a week elapses, that we are not called upon to chronicle some accident arising from the insecurity of these dreadful pit-traps, which should be subjected to the periodical examination of some competent person.”

In fact, there was such a competent person and his name was William Clendenin. He was Cincinnati’s Health Officer, and he had the happy profession of inspecting the city’s privy vaults. The Cincinnati Gazette [30 April 1866] carried Clendenin’s report to the city’s Health Commission, in which he noted:

“About 830 privy vaults have been inspected; and up to the present time nearly 50 per cent of all those examined were either full and emitting noisome odors, or needed repairs and cleaning.”

In other words, most of Cincinnati’s privy vaults leaked raw sewage onto the ground, into the street or, worst of all, into neighboring houses. One such vault afflicted Bernard O’Brien, living near the intersection of Sycamore Street and Eighth Street. He brought suit against his neighbors whose privy vault was in bad repair. According to the Gazette [26 February 1868]:

“It is alleged that the contents of the privy vault run into the plaintiff’s cellar, causing an intolerable nuisance.”

The Commercial Tribune estimated that someone died about once a week by falling into a privy vault. The old newspapers are full of such incidents, often involving children who fell to their doom. Men suffocated from the fumes while cleaning or repairing vaults. Sometimes drunks leaned a little too far over. The worst disaster in this region occurred in 1904 when nine young girls fell into a privy vault and died at Pleasant Ridge School.

As loathsome as Cincinnati’s privies were, few people knew any alternative. People were used to out-houses and found them amusing. George M. Henzel, writing in the Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin [Spring 1982] nostalgically recalled a fair amount of humor:

“To start with, as on the farms, the toilets … were out there. Many were locked and a key given to each tenant. A frequent cry was, ‘Mama, throw down the schlussel,’ schlussel, being German for key. [Out-houses] were usually in groups of two or three—that is, separated on the top, but not on the bottom. A devilish kid once hid, quietly, in one until the next one was occupied. And then with a rolled newspaper, reached under and whacked the bottom of the occupied seat. The scream could be heard for a city block. And the catch on the door had to be replaced. The victim probably suffered constipation for the rest of her life.”

By law, Cincinnati’s privy vaults were deep. The law required a minimum of twenty feet but, if the excavation had not reached sand or gravel at that level, needed to be six feet deeper. Commercial pits, like those attached to factories and businesses reached even further underground. For example, the privy vault at the Bremen Street police station was 60 feet deep.

Even so, the vaults filled up and needed to be emptied from time to time. The entrepreneurs who engaged in this repulsive occupation were euphemistically known as the “night-cart brigade,” driving their “honey wagons” from privy to privy. The Cincinnati night carts were leaky and odiferous and trundled over cobblestone streets slopping unimaginable filth with every bump. Where did they dump these loads of excrement? Usually into the Ohio River or, if they were lazy, into the Miami Canal. Sometimes, they hauled their foul cargo a couple of blocks away and just dumped it into the gutter.

Even after the city began installing functional underground sewers, few people used them. According to Geoffrey Giglierano, writing in the Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin [Winter 1977]:

“By 1870 when Cincinnati had a total population of 216,238, there were only 671 officially recorded house connections.”

Twelve years later, there was still room for improvement. In 1882, a sewer inspector named W.H. Baldwin visited Cincinnati on behalf of the United States Census Bureau. Mr. Baldwin spent six weeks studying Cincinnati’s growing sewer system and found it very impressive. On his way out of town, however, he left a warning, as reported in the Commercial Tribune [27 January 1882]:

“Mr. Baldwin reports that the sewerage of Cincinnati will compare favorably with that of any other large city, but he announces the rather startling fact that a plague spot is generating in the heart of the city, from the fact that in the large area extending from Broadway to Freeman and from Court to the Hills with a population of 80,000 people, only about 30,000 use the sewers for house drainage, and the water closets of the remaining 50,000 being sunk in the ground only the liquid deposit is absorbed, leaving the solid matter to accumulate to such an extent that it is only a question of time how soon ‘earth-poisoning’ and pestilence will arouse the authorities to the fact ‘that something must be done.’”

With the city’s population rising above 275,000 and the city’s water supply becoming ever more suspect, you might think that the city would agree “that something must be done.” Not so.

If you dare, visit the Better Housing League collection at the Public Library to view some truly offensive toilet facilities photographed between 1916 and 1920. More of the same can be found at the Library of Congress photos, where you can see photos Carl Mydans took during the 1930s for the U.S. Resettlement Administration.

Surely, you claim, Cincinnati got rid of outhouses by the 1950s! Again, not so. Dr. Floyd P. Allen, Associate Secretary and Director of Research for the Public Health Federation in Cincinnati told the Cincinnati Enquirer [6 June 1952]:

“A typical family living in Cincinnati’s basin occupies two rooms, uses an outdoor toilet with other families, has no hot water or central heating.”

Well into the 1970s, the rest stops along Ohio’s interstate highways were just elaborate outhouses built atop privy vaults.