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Curious. My grandmother lived very much like this guy while growing up + as a young adult in rural Maine. Dad too, although he was just a boy. Grandma still talks about how exciting it was to get electricity.

The indoors flush toilet was a bigger deal. Going outside in 20 below weather in the middle of the night (or really, any time) was no fun at all.

I'll have to show her this story. I think that her comment will be "Why?" followed shortly by "Idiot.".

In the ‘60s my sister and I spent the summer in rural Virginia while my mother did a summer program in college. We stayed on a farm that had electricity, but no indoor plumbing. There was a pump out front, an outhouse with a Sears catalog for toilet paper, and chamber pots under the bed.

I couldn’t get back to the city fast enough.

My uncle’s grandfather lived with my uncle in his old years. My uncle bought an old farm with the original farmhouse and also a “newer” farmhouse built circa 1930 as his first place. He still lives there btw but there is a new house on the location where the two older homes are gone now.

But anyway, “grandps McGee” as we all called him even though he was our great grandfather, had never lived in a house with electricity or running water. He wasn’t about to change either. He moved into the original farmhouse by himself and wouldn’t set foot in the “new fangled house”(the 1930 vintage one). Any house that had an indoor toilet was contaminated, by his estimation. He lived into his late 90s. Never had a driver’s license or a social security number in his entire life. My aunt brought his meals out to him.

Every spring he would hitch up daisy(his horse), and drag his outhouse to a new hole he dug himself by hand, then fill in the old hole. I’ll never forget, to this day, the vast numbers of rats that would scamper away as he dragged that outhouse away to it’s new location. Us kids used to use that outhouse too just because it was there and we were curious. But boy did it stink! Looking into the hole was scary too. Especially when imagining all those rats down there.

The “new” house didn’t even have electricity till my uncle added it. It had carbide lamps for lighting and a wood stove for heat, supplemented by a fireplace. The old house was a one room building with a pot bellied stove and a huge copper broiler for a washtub. For years the “new” house had lighting by extension cord stapled to the moldings and routed outside to the pole. When gramps McGee died, we filled in the old underground carbide tank and tore down his place. The outhouse was left in place till it fell in the hole. The original barn was left till it fell down by it’s own accord. Daisy died a few years after her owner did. The only thing left is the old root cellar...I think...it was there the last time I looked around out there.