W. P. A. Sanitation Project

Medicine Mound's privy was one of about 2.3 million sanitary privies built across the country between 1933 and 1945, most of them by carpenters the WPA trained for the work; more than 35,000 men and women are said to have learned the trade. The designs were standardized, with concrete vaults and fly-proof construction. A farm family paid around five dollars for materials, or signed a form and the government covered it. The state register notes this structure was reported destroyed in June 2008.

What the plaque says

W. P. A. Sanitation Project 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)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Copper Breaks State Park — 10 mi
  Red badlands on the Pease River between Quanah and Crowell, streaked with the green copper that lured a Civil War general here to mine, with longhorns and a dark-sky designation.
• Quanah, Acme and Pacific Depot Museum — 11 mi
  The Spanish Colonial Revival depot of a little railroad that set out for El Paso and never got past Floydada, now Hardeman County's museum alongside the county's 1890 jail.
• Red River Valley Museum — 16 mi
  Vernon's museum on College Drive, with rooms on the Waggoner ranch empire, Doan's Crossing and early Vernon, and the largest known collection of Electra Waggoner Biggs's art.
• Fire Hall Museum — 16 mi
  Crowell's local museum in the 1922 firehouse on Main Street, in a county-seat town that was almost wiped away by the tornado of April 1942 and rebuilt.

More markers nearby

• Medicine Mound Community — steps away
• Hicks & Cobb General Merchandise Store — steps away
• Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, Substation No. 12, Home of Hybrid Sorghums — 4.5 mi
• Site of the Town of Margaret — 8.5 mi