Question for the Day: Oldest Library

[james_davis_nicoll]

Would anyone out there know offhand which is the first library to have been established?

Comments

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I wonder how recently the outhouse was displaced by the indoor toilet in North America?

[editrx.livejournal.com]

I can only speak of my own farmhouse (c. 1790s), which had an outhouse, per the owner before us, until "sometime in the mid 1950s." The building itself still stands way in the back of the property (my god, what a hike in winter!), though the hole is filled in now.

We did dig up the original indoor outhouse (in this neck of the woods you have the typical farmhouse termed "big house, little house, barn" -- which is the farmhouse, a connecting smaller building, and then the barn. The middle "little house" of this farm had a two-holer indoor outhouse -- it was a reasonably wealthy cattle farm of its time and for this area. The little house fell down in the 1930s and the foundation filled in with rubble and dirt, and it became the drainage for one of the two well pumps on the property (a "dry well" drainage area). When the place was plumbed in the 1950s, the dry well was used to drain the washing machine. When we rejoined the two buildings with another "little house" three years ago, the outhouse holes still existed, barely, and had ... interesting fill of rubble, garbage (broken pottery, etc.). We had a grand old excavation process. We even found a giant black basalt boulder that had TNH squeeing in delight when she visited, and we happily broke off shards of basalt with a hammer and chisel and gloated over them that evening.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Completely displaced? Probably at least a century in the future.

I last used an outhouse in Sweden, 1965.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Let's pick the moment when more than 50% of houses had indoor toilets.

In the United States?

[(Anonymous)]

Sometime during the first Roosevelt administration.

According to the US Census, in 1940 55% of US households had indoor toilets. Unfortunately, earlier censuses didn't ask the question, but it's reasonable to assume that the 50% mark was hit sometime around the middle of the 1930s.

BTW, much of what we'd consider... not modern... but simply /basic/ in a house emerged in the interwar years. An ordinary middle-class house built before 1920 would be considered uninhabitable today. -- Yes, there are a lot of very nice older houses still around today. But without exception they either (1) belonged to the rich, or (2) have undergone massive renovation -- usually to the point where the original owners wouldn't recognize anything but the floor plan, and often not even that.

Some of the changes were technological -- the spread of central heating, for instance -- but many were organizational. The modern middle-class kitchen, for instance, with overhead cabinets, lots of counter space, and everything built around the triangle of sink - oven/stove - icebox? It was invented in Germany in the 1920s.

Anyway. Indoor toilets, c. 1935, give or take a couple of years. Another reason to hate Roosevelt!


Doug M.

Outhouses

[laetitia-apis.livejournal.com]

My family installed electric-pump plumbing when we moved back to the farm after WWII. Outhouses for summer cottages remained normal well into the sixties.