I once joked how the city’s “Privy Council” couldn’t decide the future design and location of Portsmouth’s Sewer Treatment Plant. In olden days, and not that long ago, the solution was much simpler–and cheaper. You dug a hole in the ground and covered it with a wooden outhouse.
We used to call them privies, and they were the burial site of all things unwanted. When used as an adjective, the word “privy” means private or covert. Synonyms also include–separate, personal, hush-hush, concealed, and buried. Those words, curiously, also describe the noun “privy.” And it is from forgotten Portsmouth privies that some of the city’s greatest secrets have been unearthed.
I happened to be on site a few years ago when Kathleen Wheeler and her team from Independent Archaeological Consulting (IAC) were working in the North End at what would become Portwalk. She showed me a chunk of timber once used to line an 18th century privy in the backyard of a grand old home, later razed under 20th century urban renewal. The group also found ceramic shards that we could see fit neatly together to form a colorful chamber pot. A chamber pot inside a privy.That’s pretty gross, and yet, rich with historic detail. Case in point, the 1773 wedding bottles found in the North End privy of Joshua Wentworth. His house was moved by barge to the South End in the 1960s, but his privy remained in the North End until it was destroyed by modern construction.
How did the human excreta get removed? All praise to the “night soil men” who emptied the local privies, usually at night. Pretty much the worst job in town in the 18th century. The night soil men are gone, thanks to our modern sewer technology. And judging by over-the-top development in the North End, so are the last of the historic privies. Portsmouth to its disgrace, has vague and largely ineffective guidelines about the destruction of underground historic resources. One wonders how the acres of the historic North End has been recently built over without word of any artifacts being recently uncovered. Now gone, these sites are lost forever.
READ ALSO: Controversial archaeology in the North End
© J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.
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