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All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840-1890. By Maureen Ogle. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1996. Pp. xii, 191. Illustrations; index. $39.95.)
In 1985 my wife and I moved into a mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse in the countryside east of Rochester, New York. Italianate in style, it was a near replica of the large houses found in Andrew Jackson Downing's The Architecture of Country Houses. Oddly enough, the basement did not extend under the back wing of the structure, where the kitchen and washroom were located. A large pipe projecting through the floor near the back wall of the kitchen led us to further exploration and the discovery of a huge sheet metal and brick cistern beneath the two back rooms. The pipe had been part of a pumping system, and the cistern had been filled by rainwater that ran into it from an elaborate network of interior pipes. The entire arrangement was original to the house, although the original gutters and pipes were gone.
Maureen Ogle has written about houses of this...