W. P. A. Sanitation Project
Medicine Mound, Hardeman County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1937 the State of Texas and Hardeman County worked with President Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration in an attempt to provide much-needed employment to indigent citizens and replace unsanitary privies with improved facilities. The advantages of these structures included a decrease in such diseases as typhoid fever, hookworm and dysyntery. The privies featured fly-tight construction and were carefully placed in areas where they could not pollute the water supply. One toilet was placed on this site behind the Hicks & Cobb General Merchandise store. When it was destroyed, another privy was moved from where it originally stood on the property of the Bellamy family. W. H. Bellamy and his family were Medicine Mound town founders. (1999)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1937, the State of Texas and Hardeman County joined President Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration to provide work for the poor while replacing unsanitary privies with improved outhouses. Built fly-tight and sited away from water supplies, the new facilities helped curb typhoid fever, hookworm, and dysentery. One toilet stood behind the Hicks & Cobb store, later replaced by a privy moved from the property of town founder W. H. Bellamy's family.
Why it matters
This modest privy documents how New Deal relief reached even the smallest Texas towns, pairing Depression-era employment with public-health improvements that quietly saved lives across rural America.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The 1930s were the decade the federal government came to rural America in a new and direct way. The Great Depression had thrown millions out of work, and among President Franklin Roosevelt's responses was the Works Progress Administration—a vast program designed to put people to work on public projects rather than simply hand out relief.
Much of the WPA's fame rests on big things: roads, bridges, schools, and public buildings. But its reach extended down to the humblest scale of daily life, including the outhouse. In 1937, the State of Texas and Hardeman County partnered with the WPA on exactly that kind of unglamorous, essential work.
The goal was twofold and characteristic of the New Deal. It aimed to provide much-needed employment to indigent citizens, and at the same time to replace unsanitary privies with genuinely improved facilities—turning a relief program into a public-health campaign.
People & events
The problem being solved was deadly serious, even if the structure was modest. Poorly built and poorly placed privies were vectors for disease, and the marker names the culprits directly: typhoid fever, hookworm, and dysentery. These were not abstractions in rural communities of the era; they were illnesses that sickened and killed.
The WPA's answer was careful engineering applied to a simple object. The new privies featured fly-tight construction—closing off the insects that spread contamination—and they were deliberately sited where they could not pollute the water supply. Small design choices like these were the difference between an outhouse that spread disease and one that stopped it.
The marker grounds all of this in one specific spot. One of these WPA toilets was placed on this site, behind the Hicks & Cobb General Merchandise store. When it was destroyed, another privy was moved here from the property of the Bellamy family—and W. H. Bellamy and his family were among the town's founders, a detail that ties this humble structure to the community's earliest days.
Its place in the American story
It's easy to remember the New Deal only through its monuments. But its deeper achievement was reaching ordinary people in ordinary places, and few artifacts show that better than a government-built privy in a small Texas town. This is the New Deal at ground level, doing exactly what it promised: paying people to build things that made everyday life safer.
The public-health dimension is the quiet triumph here. Campaigns to improve rural sanitation, replacing hazardous facilities with well-designed ones, saved lives that never made headlines. Fewer cases of typhoid, hookworm, and dysentery meant children who grew up healthier and families spared preventable grief—an invisible harvest of a very visible program.
That something as modest as a privy earned a historical marker is itself the point. It insists that history is not only made in capitals and battlefields, but in the practical, dignified work of making a poor community's daily life a little healthier during its hardest years.
If you visit
This is a marker that asks you to take the small seriously. There's a gentle irony in finding a historical marker devoted to an outhouse, and leaning into that is part of the fun—but read on and you'll see why it earned its place. Let the structure's humbleness reframe what you think counts as history.
As you visit, picture the era it came from. Imagine the WPA crews at work, the careful fly-tight construction, the deliberate distance kept from the water supply—all of it aimed at stopping diseases most travelers today never have to think about. The design choices are the story.
Because this site sits within the small community of Medicine Mound, it fits naturally into an unhurried, curiosity-driven wander through the area's markers. Slow down, read closely, and let this modest spot remind you that the New Deal reached all the way down to the smallest and most practical corners of American life.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Franklin D. Roosevelt
- · W. H. Bellamy
Related events
- · Works Progress Administration sanitation program (1937)
Themes & tags
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