In a time before indoor plumbing, a small little house often sat tucked behind the main building. Whether you called it the privy, the outhouse, or by any other name, this was the bathroom of its day.
Outhouses were once a familiar sight in towns, farmyards, and scattered across the wide prairie landscape. They were simple structures with a very important purpose, and while they may seem quaint now, they were an essential part of daily life. Just imagine trudging through knee-deep snow or braving howling winds in the depths of a prairie winter just to make a trip out to one—an experience many of us today can hardly fathom!
Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune to capture some of these little buildings in photographs, each one telling its own quiet story. Some stand weathered but proud, leaning slightly with age, while others are almost hidden in tall grass or crumbling back into the earth. A selection of my outhouse images even found their way into Nancy Millar’s charming book Once Upon an Outhouse, which celebrates these quirky but meaningful pieces of history.
These humble structures hold a certain nostalgia—reminders of resilience, simplicity, and the way people adapted to the world around them. Do you have any outhouse stories or memories of your own that you’d like to share?