Sorry we’re late with this one! 

It should be noted that in 1912, holes under outhouses weren’t common in West Virginia or much of rural America yet.  Rather “surface privies” that had open backsides from which waste was removed from time to time for use as fertilizer were common.  If you didn’t have a garden, there was a creek nearby that would carry it off.

A decade later, after an investigative visit to the state in 1921, Journalist Winthrop Lane wrote:

There is no collection of garbage, and the surface privy is everywhere in evidence…The most authoritative study of sanitary conditions in West Virginia mining camps that I know of is that now being made by the State Department of Health…[and] the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation.  …sanitary surveys have recently been completed of three counties. 

 

In Mingo County, almost exclusively a coal mining county, twelve communities, with a population of 3,534, were studied. Of the 728 premises visited, 632, or 80 percent, had unsafe methods of sewage disposal. The privies on these premises were either open-back surface privies or pit closets; in either case soil pollution was a grave danger. 

 

There were no privies at all on thirty-four premises. Adequate methods of sewage disposal were found on sixty-five premises and cement vaults on thirty one. Not a single safe closet (bathroom) was provided by either the schools or the railroad in any of these communities. 

 

In Logan County, where a population of 9,358 was studied, 89 percent of the privies were unsafe. They allowed the spread of disease either from soil pollution or by flies. This also is almost exclusively a coal-mining county…. In Mingo County the death rate from typhoid fever in 1919 was thirty; it is normally about ten in counties with safe closets. In Logan County the death rate from typhoid in 1918-19 was twenty-two. Other filth-borne diseases show high rates. These facts are not peculiar to mining regions. Upshur County, an agricultural district, showed similar conditions. The danger is greater, however, in coal mining regions because of the greater density of the population. 

Regarding the Smithers/Cannelton (where the above story takes place a decade earlier) area he added:

Let us go now to two of the mines of the Kanawha and Hocking Coal and Coke Company, in Fayette County. We shall have to leave the main lines of travel and trudge back some distance into the hills. Getting off the Kanawha & Michigan Railroad at Smithers, we walk along a spur of track a mile and a half to Carbondale. Carbondale lies at the entrance to “National Hollow ,” (about halfway between Smithers and Cannelton) a narrow creek bottom between two hills. 

 

The hollow is about two miles long. It consists only of the bed of the creek, which is stony and unattractive, the railroad track and straggling rows of miners’ houses. Coal has been mined here for twenty years.  

 

We shall have to “walk the ties” up the hollow. Our first impression is one of barrenness. Here there has been no attempt to make things attractive. Stones and dirt strike the eye at every point; the surface of the earth seems to be stripped to the skin. There are no sidewalks; the only firm place for human feet is the railroad track. When it rains the hollow is a stretch of mud.   

 

 The houses are thrust up wherever a place can be found for them. Some stand between the railroad and the bed of the creek; some stand at the base of the hills, the ground rising almost from their rear doors. The railroad track is the front yard of many of these houses. We could touch some of them with a ten-foot pole without leaving the tracks. Most of the houses have four or five small rooms; many are without kitchens, though the coal company is slowly building kitchens for some of these. The houses have long since lost all evidence of paint. They have a neglected and deteriorated look. Steps are missing, porches are tottering, chimneys are crumbling.   Sanitary arrangements are of the most primitive sort, and soil pollution is general. Flies, too, add to the menace arising from such conditions. The company makes no effort to better the situation and even the most elementary precautions are entirely neglected. The prospect presented by the hollow as we go up is a disorderly array of ill-kept houses, chicken coops, pig wallows, and miscellaneous outbuildings. Children play beside the railroad, in the creek bottom and in empty coal cars as we pass along.   (Lane [Civil War])

Through the 20s, there was a push to standardize the idea of using pits below outhouses to prevent the spread of disease.  It was successful to the point that we no longer think about outhouses without holes–but that took a full generation to become standard.

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