For most of American history, the act of using a toilet was not the private, routine matter it is today. Before porcelain bowls and copper pipes, before flushing handles and push buttons, Americans confronted the disposal of human waste with holes in the ground, ceramic pots, and sheer endurance. The story of how they managed it—and how the absence of a flushing toilet shaped city planning, class divisions, and the spread of deadly epidemics—is far darker and more consequential than most people realize. The first European settlers who arrived on the eastern seaboard in the early 1600s brought with them habits from England and continental Europe that were hardly sophisticated.

In many English towns, people simply threw the contents of their chamber pots out of upper-story windows into the streets below, often with a customary warning shout. This practice shaped social customs as well. The tradition of a gentleman walking on the street side of the pavement when escorting a lady was not abstract chivalry; it was practical, because he was the one more likely to be doused with waste flung from above. When settlers arrived in Virginia, Massachusetts, and the other early colonies, they found a landscape without the rudimentary infrastructure of Europe: no cobblestone gutters, no drainage ditches, no sanitation regulations.

In the wilderness of Jamestown and Plymouth, the most pressing concerns were survival, crops, and potential hostility from indigenous populations. Sanitation was an afterthought. The earliest colonists simply found a spot in the woods or at the edge of the settlement. Some contributed to what was grimly called the muck pile, a communal heap of organic waste that included food scraps, animal dung, and human excrement.

For a time, when populations were small and land was abundant, this approach worked. But as settlements grew into towns and towns into cities, the muck pile became untenable. Two tools dominated pre-plumbing America for centuries: the chamber pot and the outhouse. The chamber pot was kept in the bedroom for use during the night, in bad weather, or whenever trudging outside seemed unappealing.

Its quality reflected social station. The poor had simple unglazed clay pots. The wealthy had fine porcelain vessels, sometimes painted with elaborate floral designs or humorous illustrations on the bottom that only appeared once the pot was empty. Decorative covers called shushers, crocheted pieces that slid over the lid to muffle sounds and contain odors, revealed the deep social anxiety surrounding this basic bodily function.

But chamber pots still had to be emptied, every single morning, by someone. In households with servants or enslaved people, that task fell to them. At Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Jefferson designed an indoor privy system using a pulley mechanism. Chamber pots were placed in small wooden closets on upper floors, and enslaved workers lowered the full pots to a lower level for emptying and cleaning.

The convenience of the master depended on the degradation of the enslaved, a dynamic that played out across thousands of Southern homes for generations. In households without servants, which was the majority, the chore fell to the women of the house, who flung the contents into the yard, carried them to the edge of a field, or dumped them into the nearest ditch or stream. In towns, the contents often went directly into the dirt streets, which became open sewers caked with horse manure, pig dung, rotting food, and human waste. The stench in summer was overwhelming, and it was not merely unpleasant; it was deadly.

The second great fixture was the outhouse, also known as the privy or the necessary. Standard in American life from the 1700s, the outhouse consisted of a deep hole in the ground, usually four to six feet deep, covered by a small wooden structure with a bench and a hole cut into it. Placement required practical consideration. It had to be close enough to the house for convenience, especially at night, but far enough away that the smell would not waft inside during summer.

The general rule was the downwind side, about fifty to one hundred feet away. Families also had to consider the water table; if the pit was too close to the household well, waste could seep into the drinking supply. Many learned this lesson through illness and the deaths of children. Using an outhouse was not a gentle experience.

In winter, the seat was freezing. In summer, the interior was sweltering and the smell horrific. Flies were constant companions. Snakes were not uncommon visitors, especially in the South, and there are documented accounts of people being bitten by animals while using the outhouse.

Porcupines, attracted to salt deposits left on the wood by urine, would gnaw on the structure, sometimes creating holes large enough to admit other wildlife. At night, users had to navigate the yard by candle or lantern and hope nothing with teeth or a stinger had taken up residence inside. The question of what to wipe with was one every pre-plumbing American faced daily. Commercial toilet paper did not exist until 1857, when New York entrepreneur Joseph Gayetty began selling flat sheets of hemp-based paper infused with aloe, marketed as medicated paper.

It was expensive and slow to catch on. Rolled toilet paper did not appear until 1890, when the Scott Paper Company began producing it, and it took decades to become standard. Marketing campaigns in the 1930s boasted that their toilet paper was splinter-free. In rural America, the most common material for nearly two centuries was the dried corn cob, saved after the corn was eaten and kept in a bucket in the outhouse.

As printed materials became more common, paper replaced the corn cob. Newspapers, magazines, and torn book pages all served the purpose. The most famous substitute was the Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog, printed on soft, uncoated newsprint, easy to tear and surprisingly absorbent. Families hung it on a nail inside the outhouse, where it served as both reading material and wiping material.

When Sears switched to glossy, clay-coated paper in the 1930s, the company reportedly received complaints from customers about the paper’s lost secondary purpose. As American cities grew in the 1800s, the volume of human waste overwhelmed every system in place. In New York City in 1844, Manhattan was home to hundreds of thousands of people, and every one of them produced waste that had to go somewhere. There was no municipal sewer system, no central water treatment facility, nothing but individual privies, cesspools, and the streets themselves.

It was estimated that Manhattan’s residents produced approximately 800,000 cubic feet of human excrement in a single year. It accumulated in backyard pits, in overflowing cesspools beneath tenement buildings, in open ditches, and on the streets. The smell in the densely packed immigrant communities of the Lower East Side could reportedly be detected from blocks away. Leaky cesspools seeped into the soil and contaminated nearby wells, the very wells those neighborhoods drew their drinking water from.

It was a closed loop of contamination, and the science of waterborne disease transmission was still decades away. This is where the night soil men entered the story. Night soil was the euphemism for human waste, so called because it was collected after dark so polite society would not have to witness the process. The night soil men, often called scavengers, emptied the overflowing privies and cesspools of American cities.

It was backbreaking, nauseating, dangerous work. They dressed in old clothes or oiled leather aprons, climbed down into privy pits sometimes waist-deep in waste, and shoveled it out by hand into wooden carts. Each privy needed cleaning two or three times a year, but in densely packed urban areas, demand was constant. The covered carts were hauled through the streets in the dead of night.

Accounts from 1873 New York describe a night soil cart on Sixth Avenue filled to the brim, excrement dripping off the sides and smearing the sidewalks, the smell so powerful that pedestrians blocks away were gagging. Sometimes the waste was carted to farms as fertilizer, mixed with straw or ash. But often it was simply dumped into rivers, harbors, empty lots, and marshes. In New York, much of it ended up in the Hudson and East Rivers, accumulating to such a degree that city workers had to dredge the waterways so boats could navigate.

The night soil men themselves, mostly immigrants or Black workers, occupied one of the lowest rungs of American society. They were socially ostracized, often forbidden from entering public houses because of the smell that clung to them. Yet without them, the cities would have drowned in their own filth within weeks. The single greatest consequence of this sanitation nightmare was the cholera epidemics of the 19th century.

Cholera, caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, spreads primarily through contaminated water and can kill a healthy adult within hours of the first symptoms. It thrived in the conditions American cities had created: dense populations, contaminated water supplies, and no separation between drinking water and human waste. The first major epidemic hit the United States in 1832, sweeping through New York, Philadelphia, and other Eastern cities. The second wave in 1849 was even deadlier; in New York alone, over 5,000 people died.

By the 1870s, outbreaks along the Mississippi and its tributaries had killed an estimated 50,000 Americans. At the time, most people, including most doctors, believed in the miasma theory, that illness was caused by bad air and foul smells. It was not the smell that made people sick; it was the water. But that distinction was not yet understood, so cities fumigated streets and burned tar barrels to purify the air while the disease kept coming back.

The turning point came gradually. In 1854, London physician John Snow traced a cholera outbreak in the Soho neighborhood to a single contaminated water pump on Broad Street, providing some of the first empirical evidence that cholera was waterborne. But it took decades for this understanding to translate into policy, particularly in the United States, where cities were growing faster than infrastructure could keep up. The push for modern sewage systems began in earnest after the Civil War.

Chicago was the first American city to build a comprehensive sewer system, starting in the 1850s under engineer Ellis Chesbrough. Because Chicago sat on flat, swampy ground with almost no natural drainage, Chesbrough proposed raising the entire city by several feet to create the grade for gravity-fed sewers. Using hundreds of jack screws, workers physically lifted buildings off their foundations while sewer lines were laid beneath them. New York began building its modern sewer system in the 1850s as well, and Boston followed after the cholera outbreaks of 1849 and 1866.

But even as cities built sewers and wealthy urban homes got indoor plumbing, the vast majority of Americans still lived in rural areas, where the outhouse remained standard well into the 20th century. The White House did not get running water until 1833, and only on the main floor; the second floor did not get indoor plumbing until the 1850s. Rural communities were decades behind, with many not receiving running water until the 1950s or even 1960s, twenty years after they had gotten electricity. There were Americans who had electric lights and radios but still walked out to a wooden shack in the backyard.

There were Americans who watched the moon landing in 1969 who had grown up using outhouses. It took the Great Depression and the full weight of the federal government to begin closing the gap. In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration launched a nationwide campaign to build sanitary outhouses. Built to a standardized plan developed with the US Public Health Service, these outhouses featured cast concrete bases, angled toilet seats, T-shaped ventilation pipes, and ventilation slits near the roof.

The concrete vault design prevented waste from seeping into the surrounding soil and contaminating groundwater, the biggest health risk of traditional earthen pit privies. By the early 1940s, the WPA had constructed over 2. 3 million of these outhouses across the country. In Indiana alone, over 125,000 were built.

The program was championed by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. It was not without critics, who mocked it as a wasteful use of federal money. But each outhouse cost roughly five dollars in materials and about twenty hours of labor. The families who received them typically paid for the materials while the federal government covered the wages.

For those families, these structures represented a genuine improvement in their chances of surviving diseases that had been killing their neighbors and children for generations. The transition from outhouse to indoor bathroom was a cultural shift as much as a technological one. It changed the architecture of the American home, which now required a dedicated room with plumbing connections, ventilation, and drainage. It changed the layout of American cities, which needed vast underground networks of pipes and treatment facilities.

It changed class dynamics, because for decades indoor plumbing was a marker of wealth; having a bathroom inside your house meant you were somebody. And it changed something more fundamental: the way Americans thought about privacy and dignity. The bathroom became the most private room in the house, the only room with a lock on the door. Before indoor plumbing, this kind of privacy did not exist.

People shared chamber pots with their families and used communal outhouses with multi-seat benches. The idea that relieving yourself was something done alone, behind a locked door, in a clean, well-lit room with running water, is a historically recent invention. Indoor plumbing is arguably the single greatest public health innovation in human history, more impactful than antibiotics and more consequential than vaccines, because without clean water and effective waste disposal, none of those other advances would have mattered.

The path from corncobs and cesspools to the modern bathroom was paved with disease, death, and the backbreaking labor of people whose names were never recorded, doing work that no one wanted to see.