R.H. Espy ‘Outhouse’ 2014

As far as I know, the little two-room shed just north of the Red House is the last outhouse in Oysterville.  It seems fitting, somehow, that it is a double-occupancy affair and that it is at the erstwhile home of one of the town’s founders, R. H. Espy.  It is a cut above the run-of-the-mill outhouse – certainly better than the one I remember here at my grandfather’s place back in the thirties.

It isn’t a two-holer in the usual sense of that expression.  There were actually two compartments separated by a wall, each little room with its own entrance door.  Now days there is a full floor – no hole going down, down, ‘down into elimination’ as one time resident Edith Olson so famously wrote of her outhouse at the Bardheim Dairy property.  Nor is there a typical bench style seat upon which the user could sit and read the Sears and Roebuck catalog.

Long ago the outhouse was converted from its original use to a shed for storing garden tools or firewood or who-knows-what.  I suspect that my great uncle Cecil (the youngest R.H. Espy son) did the conversion when he moved into the house after his retirement in the 1960s.  He had been a banker in Portland and was known for his thrifty ways and for his careful stewardship of the old house and grounds.

I also think that the outhouse was the only ‘facility’ available at the R.H. House until well into the Forties.  My uncle Willard and his (then) wife Hilda bought the house in 1946. Although they lived in upstate New York, it was their plan to spend summers with their children here in Oysterville – or at least Hilda would, and Willard would join them during his vacation weeks from Readers’ Digest where he was the Circulation and Public Relations Manager.

On March 31, 1946 Willard wrote a list of their plans for updating the 1871 structure.  Item #1 was: The bathroom… will be in the little service room off the kitchen.  That bathroom is still there.  It should be noted that it was not until FDR’s rural electrification program got to Oysterville in 1938 that homeowners finally had the luxury of electric pumps and could have running water and, luxury of luxuries, inside toilets.

H.A. Espy House and Outhouse c. 1940

I suspect that most full-time residents who could afford to do so installed inside plumbing almost immediately.  But, electricity was unreliable at best in those days, and homeowners kept the “privy out back” for a good many years against the days and weeks of winter power outages.  Since no one was residing in the R.H. Espy House full-time, there seemed no urgency in updating.  Not until Hilda faced living there with four little girls who were separated in age by less than three years!

I doubt that the outhouse is the original, by any means.  I don’t know when it was built or, perhaps re-built the last time.  I suspect it was there in the1960s when Uncle Cecil returned to his boyhood home and I imagine he fixed it up for use as a shed.  Or… maybe the conversion was done by his children or grandchildren or even more recently by his now-grown great-grandchildren,  I’ll have to ask my Red House Cousins…