Some Things Do Get Better With Time

In the rush of daily life, it’s easy to forget indoor toilets are relatively new to housing construction. Those who’ve never relied on an outhouse don’t understand how relieved residents were when they had a solid privy resting on a concrete foundation. Thanks to Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, 600,000 American families enjoyed stable, sanitary facilities behind their homes.

The WPA focused on projects that improved life. Few communities could fund band shells, picnic houses, and swimming pools without federal dollars and the necessity to provide jobs. However, those weren’t the only projects that enhanced the USA. Health organizations had insisted from the early 1900s that Americans needed higher sanitary standards. Shallow pits and poor outhouse drainage led to epidemics related to fecal exposure. Scientists determined that concrete vaults at least 6 feet deep reduced such risks. This was a perfect goal for this department.

Most of us have visited WPA pools, buildings, and other monuments to hard work and hopes for better times. Depression era toilets add to the projects local labor teams and resources constructed. With so many built across the country, remains of facilities must still exist in western Kansas.

This information might help find them. Bureaucrats selected a standardized design that involved a poured underground vault planned so the top served as the outhouse foundation. Wisely, someone included a surface level concrete pot and vent hole. Cement flooring and seat construction offered better sanitation than wood construction did. Wisely, this design required screened vents to prevent fly-borne disease. Such models significantly improved public health.

While the vaults and seats were standardized and mass-produced, the actual wooden shelter depended on local materials and preferences. The plan called for a 4 x 5 frame and braced wooden door. While building crews followed similar plans, researchers note structures varied throughout the country.

Although labor teams installed over 600,000 outdoor commodes during that era, few remain. If you want to visit a Kansas WPA outhouse, you must get permission to search old homesteads for concrete foundations. Once you find one, don’t fall in the hole.

 If seeing the wooden “house” satisfies your curiosity, a landowner in McPherson County moved one onto his property years ago. The Sherman House Bed and Breakfast in Elk County transported another one to a site near their flower garden and named it “The Flower Pot.”

A trip to Franklin County Indiana offers the opportunity to check out ten such relics. For your reading pleasure, their museum has an edition of the “Indiana Community Sanitation Program Regulation Manual, Sponsored By United States Public Health Service, Indiana Division of Public Health Works Progress Administration.” This would be helpful if you want to install a reproduction on your homestead. In addition, they’ve posted official outhouse maintenance rules tacked to a surviving privy door.

Personally, I want to observe one of these as an historical object. While WPA construction has many charms, I’m happy with my indoor toilet.

Bridges of Western Kansas

Combine past information with storytelling and you get history, which both entertains and provides examples of actions that improve lives. Kansas has had thousands of years of learning how to set up functional communities. At least 155 years of those include practice establishing permanent towns operated by local and state governments.

During post-settlement years, The Great Depression delivered hard lessons as well as some of the greatest infrastructure progress our citizens have experienced. As people directly involved during those years pass and families lose sight of their personal involvement, I worry about disappearing knowledge and landmarks that told us how the Works Progress Administration improved Kansans’ lives. For those interested in this subject, a drive down local roads uncovers cleverly engineered monuments to a program designed to stimulate the economy and create beautiful yet functional structures utilizing native resources. During that Sunday cruise, explore city parks, blue highways, and rural lanes to look for old WPA bridges.

In many regions, locally quarried limestone adds decorative elements that building crews don’t achieve using traditional concrete and rebar construction. For those who enjoy connecting the past to the present, it’s interesting to visit these sites and examine them closely. Those who investigate these historical constructions find imbedded markers establishing the year WPA funds and local labor produced them.

One of the greatest strengths of this federal program was that it depended on local resources, natural and human. Those who know their regional geology can identify the origin of stones used to build the bridges. Marci Penner’s The Guidebook for Kansas Explorers helps to identify the types of limestone construction travelers view as they explore different counties in our state.

Even sightseers without that resource or another like it will recognize that different quarries supplied material used during construction. Ellis County’s light colored Fort Hays limestone clearly differs from grayish toned material found Phillips County. A short trip to view Graham WPA sites frequently reveals the use of green rock.

In theory, history should make us wiser. If that’s true, why hasn’t our state taken advantage of lessons provided during one of the most difficult times Kansans faced? Those hard years proved we could build a skilled workforce that used native material to create functional and beautiful bridges across creeks, rivers, and draws that drain our watersheds. Such efforts stimulated local economies then. Why wouldn’t they do the same today?

When I hear people complaining about a lack of jobs, I wonder why elected officials don’t steal a page from history books. They could train and hire native-born engineers and construction crews to use resources at hand to build necessary infrastructure. To retain jobs, locals could maintain those structures.

Make a point of visiting these monuments to hard work and initiative before it’s too late to see them. Contact legislators to ask what it would take to reinstate such programs. With foresight, Kansans could better utilize resources and support local companies willing to specialize in building and preserving functional bridgework. We’d be taking care of our own in more ways than one, a trait our ancestors would recognize.