Outhouses: An interview with ‘priviologist’ Mary Frazier Long

Beginning in the 1970s, the Foxfire books introduced Appalachian culture to the world.

The latest installment, Travels with Foxfire: Stories of People, Passions and Practices from Southern Appalachia, continues the tradition with comfortable, conversational vignettes from rural Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky. Authors Phil Hudgins and Jessica Phillips effectively serve Foxfire’s goal of preserving the Southern mountainous region’s traditions and folklore.

This excerpt explores stories and folklore of privies in Appalachia.

At first, the soft, sweet, Southern voice of Mary Frazier Long might deceive her listeners. She comes across as a stereotypical teacher of the old-school variety: prim, proper, polite, persnickety. But then her mischievous wit breaks through as she gets into the subject of her chosen expertise. Mary Long is a priviologist.

That’s a made-up word, of course, but it is descriptive. It means that this lovely lady has the scoop on privies. You might call them outhouses, earth closets, water closets (although there’s usually no water), johnny houses, or other names a bit too colorful to list.

Whatever the name, Long knows her stuff. She can speak from experience; like most people in their eighties who grew up in Southern Appalachia, she has walked the walk. Or she can speak from her vast studies of one-, two-, three-, or more-holers.

Years ago, Long put together a little pamphlet that featured photographs of outdoor thrones in Georgia, most of them accompanied by a thoughtful quotation such as: “Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.” She has sold or given away about ten thousand copies as she travels the state giving lectures, between two and three hundred of them on her “Privial Pursuit,” as she calls it.

“That just goes to show that people don’t have much taste,” she said. “This pamphlet makes a good golden-wedding-anniversary gift. It’s got gold on the cover. By the time you have a golden wedding anniversary, you don’t need anything anyhow.”

So why did Long become an orator on outhouses?

Here’s how it started: She and a United Methodist minister, Don Herndon, were named to a scholarship committee for the Georgia Retired Teachers Association. “I thought all we had to do was choose people to get the scholarships,” she said. “But then we found out we were responsible for getting up money for scholarships. That threw a whole new light on the matter.”

What are we going to do, Don? she asked Herndon, a school guidance counselor. Said Herndon, “Well, I’m a preacher, and I can raise money by getting honorariums for preaching at different churches. But you’re a Baptist, and you can’t even dance.”

Then Long realized that “not a lot of people are going around giving lectures on privies, and I thought I’d try it,” she said. She spoke in churches and elsewhere on the history and usefulness of outhouses, and earned money to contribute to the association’s scholarship fund.

One day, a local librarian telephoned Long and asked if she knew she’d been included in a book called Weird Georgia. No, she didn’t, she said, relieved that the call wasn’t about overdue books.

But there’s nothing weird about her field, Long maintains. After all, Deuteronomy 23:13 explains plainly what people are supposed to do after relieving themselves. So she has a biblical basis for her lectures.

Judy Johnson, mayor of Lawrenceville, proclaimed September 4, 2013, “Mary Long Day” in Lawrenceville. “She’s our local historian,” Johnson explained. “She has authored several books [five, to be exact] and articles on Lawrenceville. In the past few years, she has participated in a trolley tour. Residents get on a trolley and ride around the city, and Mary gives the historical aspects, all the interesting facts, some true, some not true. You know, Mary has a sense of humor.”

When Long lectures, she displays her privy photos on poster boards. She shuns electronic media, she said, because old people tend to go to sleep when you dim the lights to show slides.

Long knows a lot of outhouse jokes and pranks, but sometimes reality is even better. For example, she had kinfolks, Uncle Henry and Aunt Lizzie, who had a rooster that controlled both his roost and the couple’s. “They’d get about halfway to the outhouse,” she said, “and that rooster would chase them the rest of the way. They never had a can of Metamucil or anything in the house. Because of that rooster, you had to go when you got there.”

One of her favorite stories involves a young preacher in Bostwick, Georgia, who invited her to speak and then found out on the day of the lecture what she was going to talk about.

“Just before I was to speak, the preacher said, ‘Now, Mrs. Long, I’m going to introduce you, so what do you want me to say?’ I said, ‘Just tell them I’m going to talk about privies.’” Her program, remember, is called “Privial Pursuit.”

“I thought you said ‘Trivial Pursuit,’” the preacher told her, terrified of his congregation’s reaction. “Just promise me it’s not vulgar,” he pleaded. “I felt sorry for the little fellow,” Long said.

One time, Long’s reputation as a funny lady reached all the way to the nationally televised Ellen DeGeneres Show. “Are you still able to travel?” a staff member of the show asked her by phone. “Well,” she said, “I can manage to get up in the morning and brush my teeth.” She had to turn down the invitation, though, because she had committed to speaking to a group of local teachers at the same time.

Long, by the way, is versatile in her presentations. When talking to a bank group, she cracked jokes about making deposits, and for an event for public-housing employees, she referred frequently to “the relief office.” She embraces anyone with a sense of humor. “If you don’t have a sense of humor,” she’s been known to say, “you don’t have any sense at all.”

Long has cut down her number of lectures because of her husband’s health problems. He often accompanied her to speaking events and always supported her however he could, even when she was sneaking into people’s yards to take photographs.

Long has been a member in good standing of the National Privy Diggers Association, although she’s never dug a privy. She prefers digging up nostalgia instead. People enjoy remembering the days of the early-morning treks to the little house located away from the residence, but no one has expressed an interest in returning to them.

Thanks to Mary Long, however, a lot of people in Southern Appalachia are more aware of how far they’ve come since the days of “unplumbed households,” to use the government term. In her lectures, she tells the history of bathrooms and a few things about Sir John Harington, an English writer and ambitious courtier credited with inventing the first flush toilet in the late 1500s. Seeking favor from Queen Elizabeth, his godmother, he installed a flusher in her palace, but she found it too noisy and Harington’s satirical writings too crude for comfort.

Times have changed considerably. There was a time when the city of Lawrenceville was loaded with outhouses. It was an era when a person’s quiet time was more predictable, and visible. “You knew not to go to see certain people at certain times,” Long recalled, “because that’s when they were in the outhouse. You could look out and see when they were going.”

Mary Long loves history, whether it’s about presidents of her country, the city of her birth, the denomination of her Christian faith, or the outhouse of her youth. And when the history and stories are about outhouses, the subject goes pretty deep. Perhaps it’s because material for her lectures goes back to the beginning of time. As she said, “People have been going to the bathroom since Adam and Eve.”