CHAPTER ONE the awful smells HAVE YOU EVER VISITED A DUMP Or been near the bear enclosure at the zoo on a hot day Then you know icky smells
America stank in the 1600s And the 1700s And the early 1800s SMELLY STREETS Look Lots of horses clomp down the street They toss their heads and look pretty on one end But at the other end they poop Cows roam the streets and poop Huge pigs run wild eating garbage which also stinks The pigs poop In New York City the real streets haven't been seen in years There's too much poop The same is true everywhere in cities towns and farms a Fine Featheret Cleaning Crew In Charleston South Carolina a large marketplace where people bought food often was filed with rotting leftovers But luckily for residents birds were on hand to clean up the mess Buzzards regularly swooped down to grab pieces of meat and other food With their bald heads and sharp beaks buzzards aren't very pretty Even so they provided a valuable service so it was against the law to kill them Unfortunately because they ate rotten meat the birds also stank But at least they didn't fill the streets with a lot of poop
And if the layers of poop weren't enough dead dogs cats and rats pile up in the streets The smell is awful on a hot summer day like today No one bothers to pick up poop dead animal bodies or trash from the streets Such conditions are just a part of life and not the concern of the city government Sometimes human poop ends up in the streets too People don't have indoor toilets so they keep containers called chamber pots under their beds to use especially at night These stink in the morning and need to be emptied Sometimes the contents are tossed out the bedroom window onto the street below Of course a warning is called out first But it doesn't always help In 1801 in York Pennsylvania a couple was walking down the street to go to a wedding The contents of a chamber pot landed all over the woman ruining her silk dress At least she wasn't the bride SMELLY HOMES After all the odors on the streets have taken their toll you head indoors to escape no luck
The first floor of this small wooden house is a shoemaker's shop The master welcomes you while his slave continues to pound nails into the soles of shoes You can smell poop here too It has come in from the street on the hems of customers long skirts and clings to the boots of both men and women The owner and his family live in the back of the shop You sniff the air You can tell that the bedroom chamber pots weren't emptied today The fireplace in the little kitchen behind the shop smokes and the air makes you cough And since a pot of stew cooks on that fireplace all day long you can smell food burning too The family who lives here eats fresh meat vegetables and fruit in summer Unfortunately there is no refrigerator So the food sits out slowly rotting and filling the air with awful odors But it be eaten anyway Yuck
