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To: reformedliberal
Our house didn’t have plumbing until 1967. Our old plumber told us he hadn’t even seen plumbing until he went into the Army during Korea.

Wow! I guess if there isn't a nearby city, you're on your own.

470 posted on 11/20/2011 8:24:52 AM PST by Right Wing Assault (Dick Obama is more inexperienced now than he was before he was elected.)
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To: Right Wing Assault

Likely, it also depends on the topography. This is hill country, with mostly sharp ridges and a lot of high water table in the valleys.

In our old farm house, they laid out a 16x16 slab in 1967 for a *modern* kitchen. 5’x8’ was designated for the bathroom. The tub was directly on the dirt. The West wall of the kitchen held all the appliances, including a washer and dryer put in in the early 70’s, I think (we purchased in 1974). They walled in an area in the Northwest corner for the hot water heater. The pipes in that entire area regularly froze in the winter. There was no evidence of electricity or any piping in the old barn or milk house, although the stanchions & gutters were still there, so I think they just used evaporative chillers. A friend in his late 40s, tells how they just wrapped the milk cans in wet burlap and set them in the shaded milk house. It had a concrete floor and a cupola, but to this day, it gets very damp in there in the humidity of summer. It is cooler than anything else around, except the wet cellar, though.

They had gravity flow from cisterns and a ram pump in the river, back then, for water to the house through a spigot in the cellar and I think a hand pump on the kitchen sink. Today, neither would be approved by DNR or the sanitarian. The old septic system put in 1967 was a gravity type and those have all been condemned over the past 20 years.

We are about 50 miles from La Crosse, WI, which now has about 51k people, but had many less back then. Next nearest city is 90 miles or so and it is 250 miles from either the Twin Cities or Milwaukee. It took money to put in electric and plumbing, even when it became available and this has always been the first or second poorest county in WI. Our farm once had 34 acres tillable, out of over 80, but 20 acres of those fields are only reachable via horse-drawn plow. They are too steep for a large tractor.

But, they raised 6 kids on those acres and 23 dairy cows. It was a hard life.


478 posted on 11/20/2011 11:43:43 AM PST by reformedliberal
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