One hundred years ago, domestic life called for dedicated buildings back behind the house. Today, we take for granted flushing the toilet, jumping into the hot shower and turning up the thermostat. Our grandparents’ generation remembers it differently.
The little structures by the alley provided services now forgotten. Giving a view into lifestyles of long ago, these buildings illustrate how homes were heated, how people travelled and how folks handled basic sanitation.
The once ever-present outhouse can be found only in small, remote towns today This rare sighting is in Lake City. Photos by Cathleen Norman.
Small sturdy coal sheds stored fuel for the furnaces down in the basement that heated nearly every house. Chicken coops raised eggs and poultry for the table. A stable, barn or carriage house sheltered the horse and wagon or buggy that carried the family about town. And, of course, we know what the outhouse was used for – mainly poets turn nostalgic for ubiquitous little building with its slanting roof and unforgettable fragrance.
Only a few Colorado towns still have old alley buildings, vanishing remnants from past generations. Constructed quickly during a community’s earliest years, these humble structures became obsolete as soon as modern conveniences arrived. Streetcars, then automobiles, made horse-barns fade into disuse. By the 1940s, most coal furnaces were replaced by natural gas furnaces. Indoor plumbing came as late as the 1960s to some rural towns bringing the certain demise of many outhouses. Most towns banned them and forced homeowners to remove and demolish the skinny, slant-roofed shacks.
Although urban improvements have removed most alley architecture, you can still glimpse these picturesque structures in places such as Lafayette and Louisville, Victor, Nederland and over on the Western Slope. Sky-high real estate prices in ski towns instigated local laws to preserve the weathered-board back “shacks.” Alley cabins have turned into chic cafe, like the Dogwood Cocktail Cabin in Crested Butte.
The oldest neighborhoods of some Front Range communities still have functional alley structures, such as this tiny auto garage with an attached shed in Lafayette.
In Leadville, where the economy is less robust, the alley buildings clad in reddish-brown corrugated metal or aging gray wood have weathered ferocious winters. These elderly stables and sheds offer a hands-on field opportunity for historic preservation students at the Colorado Mountain College in Leadville. The Victorian-era buildings have outlived their original purpose, but townsfolk still value them as a reminder of the city’s earliest years.
In southwestern Colorado, a mountain town’s outbuildings received the dubious distinction of being named to Colorado’s Most Endangered Places List in February.
“Lake City’s alleyways – with their roughly finished and utilitarian outbuildings – are a portrait of our town’s past,” said Town Manager Michelle Pierce. “They depict the harsh and unforgiving environment that challenged everyday living and survival by early residents.”
The weatherworn materials of the alley buildings create an essence of time gone by, shown here in lake City.
In 2002, an architectural survey documented the entire Lake City Historic District and identified 76 historic outbuildings consisting of barns, carriage houses, chicken coops, sheds for wood, coal and tools, tiny garages and of course outhouses. This summer, preserving Lake City’s endangered outbuildings got help from HistoriCorps, a newly organized partnership between the U.S. Forest Service, Colorado Preservation, Inc. and Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado. During a weekend project, four Lake City outbuildings received new roofs, new foundations and other repairs.
HistoriCorps (www.historicorps.org) is roughly modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal program that provided constructive employment for young men during the Great Depression of the 1930s. HistoriCorps involves volunteers and students who work with trade specialists such as log workers, masons, window restorers and roofers to preserve historic resources on and near public lands.
The squared-log construction of this large alley shed in Lake City hint that it dates to the towns' original pioneer years.
The hands-on HistoriCorps project helped encourage a new appreciation for Lake City’s alleyway architecture. The town plans to cooperate with willing landowners to further preserve the Historic District’s rustic outbuildings as a visual connection to the town’s earliest days.
“This summer we hope to have a guided alley tour and would like to have something on our website,” said Pierce. “We’re looking for ways to attract attention and tell the story.”
The outhouse might be the most romanticized kind of back building. It was memorialized in The Old Backhouse, written by America’s revered poet James Whitcome Riley. Colorado author Ken Jessen recently published Out the Back, Down the Path: Colorado Outhouses depicting the state’s best privies.
During Colorado’s first half century, the lowly outhouse was the main means of personal sanitation. As late as the 1930s, several federal job-making programs erected thousands of the functional structures. Youthful CCC workers erected log privies in hundreds of National Parks and National Forest campgrounds in Colorado and across America. Those log buildings have become an endangered species, gradually replaced by newer, concrete block versions.
Aiding rural residents and creating jobs, the 1930s Federal Farm Personal Facility Act dispatched a truck loaded with lumber and half a dozen men to rural farms and ranches. If the outhouse on the premises failed to meet minimum government requirements, the workers tore it down and built a new one – whether the farmer wanted a new outhouse or not. The new-fangled versions had cast concrete floors to prevent hookworm penetration and ventilation stacks for air circulation. A three-man crew spent about 20 hours constructing the “Eleanor” (or “Roosevelt” was another nickname.) If the farm family could afford it, they paid $17 for the materials. The labor was free.
An interesting accessory for the outhouse was rhubarb. Pioneer property owners planted rhubarb, also called “pie plant,” around the privies where the leafy plant came up early in spring.
One woman recalled, “My grandmother told me that rhubarb was always grown by the outhouse. Any time a girl or woman went to the outhouse she would always bring back a few stalks of rhubarb. If anyone asked, she could say she was out picking rhubarb.”
Breckenridge honors the outhouse annually with the mid-summer Outhouse Races that “represent the hardships faced by our forefathers.” Rules are simple. Racers concoct their outhouse of any solid material, as light as cardboard or as heavy as plywood. All outhouses should have four sides, a roof and a doorway. The door is optional. Windows are allowed, but no glass may be used. Any number and size of wheels may be used.” The speediest outhouse wins first place prize of $500.
So, as you travel around Colorado – or even in the alleys of your own hometown – keep your eye out for these colorful little buildings that tell the story of the days before modern conveniences.
