Digging the Cesspool

February 29, 1936  Mama and Mary did Saturday’s work.  The boys plowed the garden.  I harrowed the garden.  The boys also worked on the cesspool again.

The sewer system for a farmhouse in the 1930s was much simpler.  Everyone used the outhouse, so that sewage went into a pit.  There was some water used in the kitchen, and it drained out into the yard through a pipe.  The only water that went into the cesspool was the wash water – the cesspool had to be deeper than the basement because water had to drain by gravity from the floor drain where they washed in the basement. 

The boys had dug on the cesspool the day before and they continued on this day, which was a Saturday.  And they worked on it Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday the following week.  Cornelius had been a well digger in Herbert, Sask., in his early 20s, so he was not afraid of the hard work of digging deep holes, but now he had three strong sons to do the digging.