Outhouses On Outs In Yakima

YAKIMA - Heard about The Bridges of Madison County? How about the outhouses of Yakima County?

Today's outhouses are scarce. A century ago in Yakima, nearly every building had one. Now, about the only outhouses you'll find are in museums, the county's hinterlands or parks.

The 1990 U.S. Census reported about 700 year-round housing units in Yakima County lacked complete indoor plumbing. That's about 1 percent of the homes with outhouses, slightly higher than the state average.

Most of the newer privies are chemically treated and can be easily moved and pumped. They're not the interesting ones. Outhouses with character feature moons on their doors, two holes cut into a bench and straddle deep holes.

Folks sprinted to them in the winter or held their noses in them during the summer. These privies offered copies of the Sears Roebuck catalog for toilet paper and took scoops of lime to encourage the digestion below.

Today, old-time outhouses are rare, but you can still spot them in mountain areas or on the closed part of the Yakama Indian Reservation. They exist where running water and electricity are scarce.

The grandest sits on a Chinook Pass ridge at the former American River Ski Bowl Lodge. The 20-holer - 12 for women and eight for men - is being repaired by the Apple Valley Kiwanis Club.

In the city of Yakima, bathrooms began to replace outhouses in 1890 when Judge Edward Whitscon, the city's first mayor, established the first water system.

Fifty years later, outhouses mostly had vanished inside the city limits. The county's rural areas were slower to modernize. In many spots, outhouses remained well into the 1950s.

Bob Eschbach, who grew up in the Naches Valley, remembered tipping one over as a school prank in the early 1940s. The town marshal found out, however, and forced the students to dig a new hole and cover it with the upended loo.

Don Hill, owner of Cliff's Septic and Portable Toilets, recalled the thrill of his family's first indoor toilet in 1956, when they moved into a new Grandview home.

"I'll never forget it; we were so excited," Hill said.

There are still quite a few outhouses, but they're in remote locations, where they're beyond power, and water is impractical.

The oldest and best preserved outhouse stands at the Central Washington Agricultural Museum in Union Gap. A fancy two-holer, built in 1910, it features double walls, a peaked roof and an old catalog for, er, perusal.

It once belonged to the Wadecamper family of Ahtanum and now stands locked up and set away from the rest of the equipment.

Next to some iron machinery sits a green shed built in 1937 by the Work Progress Administration (WPA), featuring a concrete base and air vent off the toilet.

The WPA built thousands of them around the nation as part of President Roosevelt's New Deal; several still stand in campgrounds today.

The U.S. Forest Service owns most of the county's outhouses. Mike Davis, forestry technician with the Naches Ranger District, oversees the maintenance of about 260 outhouses in campgrounds and at trailheads. These privies range from $12,000 for a single-holer to $24,000 for a two-holer.

The district also has some solar toilets that capture and store the suns rays, recharging a battery for a fan and a light.

"We have a number of different styles," Davis said. None are dug into the ground. They either have concrete or fiberglass tanks. In the campgrounds, they're cleaned at least twice a day, and on the weekends, up to four times a day.