I know some fans love to make fun that the Old House had an outhouse. However, I can't go one more second without pointing out that (and this isn't directed at any one fan in particular because several have been guilty 
):
- The flush toilet was invented in 1596 by John Harrington
- First valve-type flush toilet was introduced in 1738 by a man named J.F. Brondel (J.F. Bronde)
- Alexander Cummings invented the Strap, a sliding valve between the bowl and the trap in 1775.
- Samuel Prosser applied for and received a patent for a plunger toilet in 1777.
- Joseph Bramah altered the design in 1778 so that it had a valve at the bottom of the bowl that worked on a hinge, a predecessor to the modern ballcock.
And something tells me the Collinses were rich enough to have had the latest toilets installed in the Old House when it was constructed in 1767 - and the facilities were probably upgraded with each new innovation (Revolutionary War be damned!). 
The idea of Joshua Collins - or any members of that generation of the family, for that matter - actually using an outhouse is patently absurd! I suspect they would rather have been dead. 
Actually...in 1795, outhouses were so common that no one thought anything about them. Outhouses in 1795 were not backwards. They were an advancement over going into the woods and squatting or using a tree. Joshua, Barnabas, Naomi, Sarah, Josette, they all used the outhouse. Or the chamber pot. Or the woods, if the need arose.
In fact, in big cities, there was such a lack of plumbing and ways of carrying away waste that people dumped night soil from bed pans into their cellars and basements and even into the street. Outhouses *might* be cleaned out by a nightsoil man from time to time, if you had the money, but mostly the sewage lingered there to rot. London in 1795, certainly much more advanced than a backwater village such as Collinsport of the same year, had no drainage for sewage. In fact no sewage system existed (except to take away rainwater), hence the epidemics of the 1850s that generated (finally) an interest in creating a sewer system, instead of just using the River Thames. Indoor plumbing was too new, even in the early 1800’s, to be readily accepted, and certainly was not accepted until there was the infrastructure to support it. That infrastructure in London wasn't created until the late 1850's, and as I recall, NYC developed theirs some time after that. So even as they had toilet designs with valves and bowls and hinges, there was no way to hook the toilets up to anything to make them useful. Especially not in Maine.
Consider the fact that they didn’t even have water pumps in 1795 in Maine. They were still using wells for water in that part of the country until at least the 1820's. New York City might have had a few pumps in 1795, but they were few and far between and made of wood. The pipes that supported the few pumps that did exist were made of wood as well, and had the tendency to rot and burst. No such water pumps have been documented in the any part of Maine, and not north of Frenchman Bay, where Collinsport is said to be located in 1795. So, if upstate Maine didn’t have the plumbing for a pump, they certainly wouldn’t have had the plumbing for an indoor toilet.
As much as some might want the Collins family to have an indoor toilet, all the technology in the world would not make up for the fact that the availability of enough water pressure, pipes, and a plumber to install such a thing in 1795 in what was not yet the state of Maine was somewhat lacking. Indoor plumbing was invented, but not used until much later, and then only in big cities. Just because something was invented, doesn’t mean it was adopted for common use.
Check out the non-fiction research book A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, which is available on amazon.com. This book carefully researches the day to day life of the real people of Maine, both the rich and the poor. No mention of indoor plumbing is made, though there are plenty of references to dumping nightsoil from chamberpots onto the garden for fertilizer.
Yours in Research,
MaineGirl
