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This project was supported by Grant No. 15JOVW-21-GG-00706-MUMU awarded by the Office on Violence Against Women, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this PSA are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. De.partment of Justice.
A P R 2 2 // C O U N T R Y R O A D S M A G . C O M
Smoking in the Privy
FROM ABANDONED WELLS AND OUTHOUSES, DOUGLAS DIEZ HAS AMASSED OVER 5,000 HISTORIC PIPES Story by R. Stephanie Bruno • Photos by Kimberly Meadowlark
W
hen he was fifteen years old, Douglas Diez would spend afternoons taking his grandmother’s car out to go bottle digging. After school, he could be found hip deep in area swamps, in old wells, and most often, in the buried outhouses of New Orleans past. It all began with a challenge from his grandmother, who promised him use of the car and five dollars each time he went digging for antique bottles. It didn’t take long for Diez to teach himself the archaeological technique of probing—similar to the practice used by gas line companies —to find privies, the ultimate source of bottles. Families in the 1800s would routinely toss unwanted household items in their privy, ; today amateur and professional archaeologists might find anything in them from crockery and shoes to turtle and oyster shells, combs, eyeglasses, and of course, bottles. During the rise of modern plumbing, privies were filled in with soil, effectively burying their contents. Infill dirt does not compact to the degree of untouched soil, so bottle diggers—searching on residential lots in small towns as well as urban neighborhoods—can use long
probes to find “disturbed soil” in the subsurface. To locate a privy or well, Diez would insert his probe into the ground to see how deep it would go before meeting resistance; if it only went a couple of feet before stopping, the soil was likely undisturbed, and there was no privy in that spot. Alternatively, when he would insert the probe, and it sank all the way up to the handle, he’d get out a shovel and start digging. One particular Friday afternoon, Diez took off after school and drove from his home in Gonzales to New Orleans, planning to scout out a privy or two. He landed on the corner of Magazine Street and Howard Avenue (now Andrew Higgins) and stopped at the site of a recent demolition. Out came the probe, and Diez got to work. “I found disturbances and started hitting bricks and granite and glass everywhere all in a little circle. I realized that I had found either an old outhouse or I’d found an old well,” he said. “I drove back home around six, seven o’clock. I put out my hard hat, work boots, my ropes, my buckets, all my tools, and the next morning at 4 am, I’m back at the corner of Magazine, alone, and I start digging.” Diez had found an old brick-lined
