>>I unearthed a  19 th cent Privy in new Hampshire and found it full of
small
corn pones( also broken clay pipes and snuff bottles) which I was told
predated toilet paper; any research on this ? <<

During our family vacation the summer of 1956 my dad and I did a research
project on this topic at my grandmother's town of Virdigre, Knox Co.,
Nebraska. This research was of immediate concern because my grandmother did
not yet have an indoor bathroom like we did back home. We all relied on the
3-holer out back as did most other households in this small farming village.
Our research goal was to discover which corn cobs in particular were the
most "comfortable" to use. One morning we began with a series of oral
history interviews down on Main Street recording the results with my dad's
Bell & Howell wire recorder, and were immediately dismissed by everyone out
and about that morning as those yahoos from Lincoln. We had better luck at
Felix Liska's tavern the next Saturday evening. (my dad and uncle snuck me
in the back door along with Bell & Howell, but quickly realized this bunch
of farmers and ranchers would have nothing to do with recorded
conversations. They were suspicious of us and wondered why we would bring a
suit case to the tavern, but we won their confidence when we told them it
was a tool kit and pulled the wire reel out of the recorder and used the
wire to restring the ring-counter over the pool table which had been ripped
down in a brawl the night before. So, we got the scoop on poop scraping from
those who knew. In the old days corn cobs were always used in the outhouse.
Real men used field corn cobs. There was a clear concenses that DeKalb #234D
hybred seed corn made the best cobs for outhouse use. They were also good
for cleaning cow flop off your boots before you came in from milking to have
some breakfast. The softer texture and smaller diameter of popcorn cobs was
appreciated by the women and could even be dipped in a cup of water to
soften them further. Being good researchers, we left the tavern early since
we had to be up early in the morning for the next phase of our research
project. While everyone was at church we surveyed all the outhouses in town
to determine what types of wipes were actually being used my the local
populace. The men at the tavern were right, we found several with a bushel
basket of the large red seed corn cobs and smaller peck baskets of white
popcorn cobs. We also found a Sears catalog in almost every outhouse. At
first we thought they were just reading material until we noticed they all
had most of the pages torn out of them. The glossy color pages were always
left until last.

John Leeke