"Night soilers." One of history's worst jobs.

In 1860-61, John D. Bellamy, a medical doctor, had his family home built at 5th and Market sts. It featured gas lighting, a rainwater recycling cistern, a freshwater well, and various methods of abating summer heat. What he didn't have was access to a decent sewer system. Wilmington was the largest city in the state, but it took many decades to address the issue. In lieu of a citywide system, the main Bellamy house had one bathroom with water provided from an indoor tank, multiple chamber pots, and two privy rooms in the slave quarters with five toilet seats per room above a deep pit. It's likely that enslaved workers used one of these privy rooms, and the other was for white males. The women of the family used the chamber pots and commodes, which were then emptied by workers into the privies. Over time, those privies had to be emptied.

The privies are the two rooms on the ground floor to the right in the museum's slave quarters building.

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A Recurring Problem
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​​In a 1947 Wilmington Morning Star article reminiscing on his 42-year medical career, Dr. John B. Cranmer remembers the state of city sanitation. "In 1905 Wilmington was far from a clean city. The surface of the ground was literally one big cesspool. There were 7,000 surface closets in the corporate limits ... When the scavenger carts came around at night to clean these closets, the stench was horrible for blocks around. The water supply of the city - from the Northeast River - was untreated, unfiltered and often contaminated."

​The 'closets' were privies and outhouse toilets, and the doctor further remembers how animals were kept in yards and how flies swarmed in the days before a sewer system or window screens. Unsurprisingly, disease was rife. Cranmer noted, "When Dr. Charles T. Nesbitt, County Health officer, made the bold published statement that 'any one who had typhoid fever had taken something into their mouths that had passed through someone else's bowels,' the town went wild with indignation but they held out their arms by the hundreds for typhoid inoculation." As well as typhoid, hookworm, tuberculosis, malaria, and much else were common.

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Historic tunnels were drains
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The 1769 CJ Saulthier map below shows early Wilmington and many of the streams that run from the ridge that is now 5th Avenue down to the Cape Fear River.

​​Wilmington has a series of tunnels, dating from its earliest years. The largest is named Jacob's Run and passes not far from the Bellamy site (read about Jacob's Run in the Star News here). These tunnels run across downtown to the river and have been mythologized as routes for escaping slaves or hideaways for smugglers (visit another Star News story here). More prosaically, however, they were actually culverts for the streams and rudimentary drains.

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Efforts to improve sanitation in the decades after the Civil War included regulations requiring privies to be cleaned every two weeks, with fines imposed for non-compliance. In 1877, the North Carolina State Board of Health began regulating privies, focusing on disease prevention and proper sewage disposal. (Chronicling America, NCPedia)
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These historical sanitation practices reflect the broader public health challenges faced by North Carolina communities and towns across the country before the advent of modern sewage systems. In the early twentieth century they began to appear in urban areas but rural regions would have to wait into the 1950s and 1960s for indoor plumbing and municipal systems. Specific records of "night soilers" - workers who collected human waste from privies and cesspools in the nineteenth century — are scarce locally but the jobs were often performed by African-American workers during Reconstruction. 

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The Bellamy privies were housed in two chambers, one for white men and boys and the other for male and female enslaved workers.

Getting The Scoop On … Well, Poop!​
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Our lead volunteer interpreter, Wade Toth, shares some frequently asked questions by visitors to the site. As you might imagine there's a lot of interest, and a little dark humor, in the slave quarters' privies. Questions include: “Why 10 seats?” “Didn’t they have to be cleaned out?” "How did that work?" “Where did they put the waste once it was removed?” “Was toilet paper used?”
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An explanation for the ten seats, five in each of the two privies, was to spread the waste out more evenly. Some visitors are surprised to find out that the nine-foot-deep pits were not connected to any sort of 1860s sewerage system, but rather they had to be cleaned out by hand periodically. A typical one-hole privy would perhaps need cleaning two to three times a year. The Bellamy privies may have needed less frequent cleaning given the size.

​The job of hand-removing the waste was left to the workers called 'night soilers' or, with grim irony, 'honey dippers'. 'Night', since it was a job done in the darkness, and 'soil', since waste was covered with dirt to conceal odors and because of its possible use as manure. Once removed and carted away, waste from city privies could have been taken to a remote spot outside Wilmington for dumping or burial. The town was spatially compact and beyond 10th Street it quickly became rural farmland. Another possibility was to dump waste directly into the Cape Fear River and allow the tides to sweep it into the ocean. (Here’s a little known factoid: In the 1980s, a home on South Front Street still had its flushing toilet empty directly into the Cape Fear River.)
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Using waste from privies as fertilizer for crops may have been frowned upon in nineteenth century urban areas. However, the “ick” factor presumably would have been considered and not our modern knowledge of disease-carrying pathogens associated with human waste. That's not to say that it wasn't used as fertilizer when deemed necessary.

Pictured right is the pit below the privies under the museum's slave quarters. Light is coming through one of the five toilet holes. Five more in the adjacent room, meaning ten in total, mirror this setup and the wall to the left separates the underground space into two. The arched clean out you see at the bottom of the pit extends a little beyond the width of the wall at the front of the building. 

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The two rooms mirror each other above and below ground. Therefore, there are two clean out arches. Night soilers would have to dig a deep trench at the front of the building down to those arched openings to dig out the contents. Approximately where the arches are below ground in the front wall are marked by red dots on the image above.

To the right is an image of one of the privy rooms with five wooden toilet seats and covers. The walls are plaster, some of which is original. The exposed brick is the support for a fireplace upstairs.

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This building was completed in 1859 and seven enslaved females, including three children, lived here. An adjacent carriage house would have contained one or two enslaved men at various times. The main house was completed in 1861 and soon contained eleven family members, most of them children. Clearly a population of that size would create a good deal of waste. All of the occupants besides Sarah, an enslaved housekeeper, left to escape a Yellow Fever epidemic in 1862 until a post- Civil War return in 1865. The on-site population dwindled after Emancipation and, later, as the family dispersed to their own homes. An indoor plumbed toilet was likely part of house-wide upgrades in the first decade of the twentieth century. The slave quarters was rented sporadically up to the 1930s.

Left: close up of the arched privy pit clean out. Above: artifacts excavated from the privy and gardens in the twentieth century.

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Toilet 'Paper'

In Washington, DC, in the mid-nineteenth century human waste was dumped into a marshy area adjacent to the White House and a mere seven blocks from where the city obtained drinking water. Some historians believe that possible contamination of the drinking water may have contributed to the untimely death of President William Henry Harrison in 1841. On that note, think of the dangers of disease-carrying pathogens and the closeness of the Bellamy privies to the fresh water well! After all, as yet there was no germ theory, no knowledge of viruses, and no understanding of groundwater contamination.

Obviously, some form of toilet paper, or perhaps cloths, for cleansing was used at the Bellamy site, but exactly what was used is not known.

The Chinese were known to be using paper 1,400 years ago, but this option would have been expensive for most Americans. People would have instead used whatever was cheap or free. Items such as hemp, rags, moss, hay, wood shavings, Spanish moss, magnolia leaves, pine straw, and plant husks were the toilet paper equivalents.

American Joseph Gayetty introduced his Gayetty’s Medicated Paper to consumers in 1857. The sheets of paper were boxed flat, embossed with his name, and moistened with aloe which allowed him to market the product as an anti-hemorrhoid agent. It could still be found in stores into the 1920s. Less than 20 years after Gayetty’s product hit the shelves, the Scott brothers of Philadelphia produced rolls of toilet paper. The product was cheaper in that it was a roll, not pre-moistened, and lacked the embossing - but often contained wooden splinters. Ouch.