LETTERS: Outhouse tour a great idea
To the Editor:
The Peabody Historical Society is delighted with your suggestion for an outhouse tour if a sufficient number of such structures can be located. We even have plans for building your own! I suspect the country sanitation director David Brazil would give permission for "outhouses which are not really outhouses." I understand that outhouses are the "in" thing for your estate or country home and the uses are simply countless — tool sheds, meditation centers, elegant dog houses (for man or beast) or simply a "folly" as grace the English countryside. (Consult Webster for definition.)
A discussion of just what is an outhouse could take hours at a city council meeting and building permits could become legal wonders. The Historical Society even has a great collection of Sanborn maps which were hand drawn insurance maps of the 1800s that showed all the locations of sources of water (cisterns and wells) and all the outhouses! The maps are basically of the downtown area of Peabody but offer excellent guidelines. We also have some grand photographs of various outhouses, specifically the one for the first free library in Kansas. The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) outhouse at the Morgan House is rated "right on the cutting edge" by historical architects in their discussions. We could even loan out the plans for this special structure that was designed by Stan Hansen, AIA, in 1993.
The design arm of Peabody's Main Street program could offer color suggestions and the Benjamin Moore Paint people have consultants on historic colors. We are assuming the outhouses could not be completed before our planned fall tour of downtown Peabody Christmas celebrations, decade by decade. We will keep searching our files for those detailed plans given out by the WPA (Works Progress Administration) during the 1930s and hope to make them available to the public soon.
Marilyn Jones
Peabody
