A Most Necessary Item
Heather A. Hembrey, M.A., M.A.A.
It’s a cold night and “nature is calling”. You don’t want to leave your warm bedroom and venture into the dark to find your way to the outhouse. Luckily, you don’t have to because, stashed under the edge of your bed, you have a chamber pot. Your urgent problem is solved.
This white ironstone chamber pot was excavated at the Ash Grove site in Fairfax County. It was made by the Cook Pottery Company of Trenton, New Jersey, between 1893 and 1926. It is fitted with a single handle and measures 4 ¾ inches high and 9 inches across at the rim. Some ceramic chamber pots were highly decorated. Others were made of enameled metal.
Chamber pots were the predecessors of today’s flushing toilets. They were an alternative to the outdoor privy, outhouse, or “necessary house”. Homes may have contained a chamber pot in each bedroom or, in smaller less affluent households, a family may have shared one. A daily morning task was to empty the chamber pots into the outdoor outhouse, a job that usually fell to women.
A chamber pot might be disguised in a fashionable chair or under a cushion. Or one might be placed inside a commode – a small wooden structure resembling a nightstand with a hold cut in the top that was covered by a hinged lid. The Sears, Roebuck and Company 1902 catalog sold a commode “…with a beautiful top covered with fine Brussels carpet… These commodes are something that should be in every well regulated house.”
Fairfax County’s archaeologists recover and preserve artifacts ranging from exquisitely decorated buttons to simple everyday artifacts, including this humble and most necessary chamber pot.
Image credit: Catalogue no. 112, Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1902, page 1075. Winterthur Museum Library through Internet Archive.
