DIPPED PRIVIES?

[willong]

I've seen several posts on this forum that speculate on, or categorically state that "the privy was dipped" or "privies in Baltimore are heavily dipped" or similar statements. I assume that dipping a privy is akin to pumping a septic tank; that is, the material is removed and hauled away--am I correct in that assumption?

If so, where was that material subsequently disposed of?

Was it simply dumped in municipal landfills of the time?

 

[Clam]

As was stated the trash from the privys in baltimore were always assumed to have been dumped in the patapsco river and it's tributaries. The trash was loaded onto barges taken out to the rivers and dumped by captains who were on their way to the county or eastern shore to pick up produce. The main reason we have come to this conclusion is alot of bottles have been found by oyster fisherman over the years and various dredging projects have also turned up huge quanities of bottles and shards.

 

[RICKJJ59W]

In big city's they had (Honey dippers/chiffonier's dumps) a place where the privy cleaners and street cleaners went to dump the the days trash and crap from the pits.Most of the time these dumps were picked over heavily by the scavengers for the glass and what ever they could sell.
In the smaller towns they did the same thing but it was on a much smaller scale.I have found honey dippers dumps in the woods.There was nothing more then a few shards of bottles left.The areas that I found looked like a small mountain's of rocks piled up.Underneath the stones I found the shards form the bottles and night soil.What I think they did was dumped the fresh crap from the pits on these stones and it drained down into the pile.They took the whole bottles to sell for re use.I could not find any evidence on this (stone pile)theory but I have found a number of these piles in the woods near the edge of towns in my area.All had night soil mixed in and old bottle shards.

 

[Lordbud]

The most recent posting here: http://www.westernbittersnews.com/ is - in part - a reprint of a vintage newspaper article concerning recycling of bottles and other materials in San Francisco which appeared in the S.F. Evening Bulletin of July 31st, 1875. The numbers of bottles recycled then is astounding; everything was reused.

 

[RICKJJ59W]

Could you imagine if the stuff wasn't re used.[]

 

[privvydigger]

I've been looking for the honey dipper dump for Summit Hill because the majority of pits are dipped.....There is no streams or rivers close enough to dump but there was mine pits and over burden piles....I'm wondering and hopeful if ever i do find it
they'll be anything in it.....I belive I found a Lansford oneby the midnite soil...rich dark black earth. I never heard of any real good search areas accept in Lansford
A guy said his grandfather said his dad used to bitch about them dumping it to close to town

 

[logueb]

In the small town that I went to school at in the 50s there was this old guy with a horse drawn two-heeled cart. He was hired by the city to clean the privies. Shovel into the cart and haul it over past the slaughter house to the city dump, which was located at the edge of a creek. You hear a lot of old timers refer to the city dumps as "Bone Yards". A lot of towns had slaughter houses and it seems to me that they were always located near the city dumps. I visited that dump back in the 70s. They just piled everything into a mountain of trash and then would bulldoze it over into the creek to flatten the top and start all over. There were no landfill standards back in those days and everything went into the city dump.

 

[willong]

Thanks to everyone who responded to my question.
A lot of interesting information was provided that really addressed what I was speculating to myself about. I figured if the privies were dipped, the muck had to be dumped somewhere; and, if a digger could locate that somewhere he'd have a potential gold mine (well, poop mine, I guess) of antique bottles. Have to admit that I never thought about contemporaneous recycling, though.
My dad was a WWII vet, went in on D+2 in a combat engineering battalion, and made it through the whole conflict intact. He also did another hitch with occupation forces after the war in Germany, when and where he met my mother. When we were visiting family in Germany in 1964, we still saw many “Honey Wagons†travelling the roads and spreading their raw contents directly upon agricultural fields (seems surprising to me in hindsight, given the Germans’ propensity for over-regulating virtually everything). When I commented on wagons, my dad told me he knew of an incident after the war when two American GI’s ran a jeep into the back of one of the honey wagons—reminds one of that scene in “Back to The Future†but a whole lot nastier!