Boston, Massachusetts. The year is 1700. The sun hasn’t risen yet and the streets are already filled with a smell that would stop you cold.
Not the smell of bread, not of wood smoke, something heavier, something that sits in your throat and doesn’t leave.
A woman opens the second floor window of her home. She holds a ceramic pot in both hands.
Without looking down, without warning, she tips it over the edge. The contents hit the frozen mud below with a dull, wet thud.
She closes the window, goes back to bed. This wasn’t a scandal. This wasn’t a crime.
This was Tuesday morning in colonial America. And if you think that’s the worst of it, you have no idea what’s coming.
Now, let’s talk about what life actually smelled like in 1700. Most people picture colonial America as something out of a painting.
Wooden churches, candlelit kitchens, families gathered around a fire. And sure, that part existed, but what the paintings always left out was everything below the frame.
The streets, the water, the air, the bodies. Imagine walking through Boston on a warm afternoon in July.
The main road, if you can call it that, is a dirt path churned up by horses, cattle, and foot traffic.
On either side, the mud is a mixture of animal waste, rotting food scraps, and the contents of every chamber pot in the neighborhood dumped that same morning.
The smell rises in waves whenever the sun hits it. It wraps around you. It clings to your coat.
This wasn’t a city in decline. This was a city at its finest. And it wasn’t unique to Boston.
Philadelphia, New York, still called New Amsterdam not long before, Charleston. Every colonial settlement ran on the same invisible system.
No pipes, no drainage, no concept of what we’d recognize today as sanitation. Just the idea that if you throw it outside, it’s someone else’s problem.
The chamber pot, a simple ceramic or tin bowl kept under the bed, was the universal solution to human waste.
Everyone had one. Everyone used one. And every morning the contents had to go somewhere.
In Europe, people had developed a habit of shouting a warning before tossing it from the window.
The phrase came from France, “Gardez l’eau.” Watch out for the water. The warning wasn’t always given, and even when it was, there wasn’t much you could do about it on a narrow street.
That habit crossed the Atlantic with the settlers. So did the pot. So did everything it carried.
Now, here’s where it gets into something that most people don’t think about. The physical structure of colonial homes wasn’t designed with any of this in mind.
There were no outhouses built into the architecture of early colonial towns. The privy, a basic hole in the ground with a wooden structure around it, was a later development, and even then it was usually at the back of a property, online, dug near the vegetable garden, because colonists believed human waste was useful for crops.
They weren’t entirely wrong, but they were entirely unaware of what else it was doing.
Animals made it worse. And by animals, I don’t mean the occasional stray dog, I mean pigs.
Dozens of them. A roaming freely through the streets of Philadelphia and Boston, eating garbage, rooting through the mud.
They were allowed, even encouraged, because they cleaned up organic waste, which worked in the narrowest possible sense of the word, while creating an entirely different set of problems.
Horses, cattle herded through town on the way to slaughter, chickens in the yard next to the kitchen.
The line between where the animals lived and where the people lived was blurry at best, and in poorer households, it didn’t exist at all.
Benjamin Franklin, who grew up in Boston before moving to Philadelphia, wrote about this in 1739.
In a letter to the Pennsylvania Gazette, he complained about the state of the streets, about slaughterhouses operating next to homes, about the smell that hung over the city in summer.
Franklin was ahead of his time in a lot of ways, and sanitation was one of them.
But in 1739, nobody was ready to listen. Now, think about this for a moment.
If the streets were in that condition, what do you think the water looked like?
The primary water source in most colonial towns was the well. A hole dug into the ground lined with stone, drawing up groundwater.
Simple. Logical. And in the right conditions, safe enough. But colonial wells weren’t dug in the right conditions.
They were dug close to homes, and close to homes meant close to privies.
And a privy is just a hole in the ground with nothing between its contents and the water table.
The distance between a typical colonial well and the nearest privy was often less than 15 m, about the length of a city bus.
In some cases, less than 10. The soil filtered some of it. Not enough. Not even close.
People knew the water tasted off sometimes. They didn’t know why. Germ theory was still a century and a half away.
The microscope existed, but the connection between invisible organisms and human illness hadn’t been made yet.
So they drank the water, felt sick occasionally, assumed it was the weather or God’s will, and moved on.
Or they drank beer. And this is where it gets genuinely strange if you’re hearing it for the first time.
Colonial families, including children, drank beer every single day. Not because they were all alcoholics, because beer was safer than water.
The brewing process involves boiling. Boiling kills what we now know are bacteria. Nobody understood that in 1700.
They just noticed that people who drank beer got sick less often than people who drank from the well.
And so beer became the default beverage at every meal, including breakfast. John Adams, who would later become the second president of the United States, wrote about starting his mornings with a pot of hard cider and salted fish from the time he was a child.
Schoolchildren in Massachusetts were documented as receiving small beer, a low-alcohol brew, maybe 1 or 2%, as part of their daily diet.
A mother serving her 5-year-old a mug of beer at breakfast wasn’t neglectful. She was, by the standards of the time, being careful.
That detail stops people cold every time, and honestly, it should, because it tells you everything about how far removed colonial life was from anything we’d recognize today.
If the water in the streets were that dangerous, you might wonder what happened when people actually got sick.
And then the answer is something that might be harder to hear than anything we’ve covered so far.
The medicine of 1700 was not medicine in any modern sense. It was guesswork wrapped in authority.
The dominant theory of disease at the time was miasma, the idea that illness came from bad air, the kind that rose from swamps, from rotting material, from anything that smelled foul.
Which ironically put them in the right neighborhood. Sanitation does matter. But their reasoning was completely wrong, and it led them to treatments that had nothing to do with the actual problem.
Bloodletting was standard. A patient with a fever would be bled, sometimes a half liter removed in a single session, a little more than a standard wine bottle.
The logic was that the illness lived in the blood, and removing blood removed illness.
The patient would weaken, and the doctor would interpret that as the fever breaking. Sometimes the patient recovered.
Often they didn’t. Calomel, a compound of mercury wild, was prescribed as a purgative. It caused the body to expel everything.
It also caused nerve damage, tooth loss, and in high doses, organ failure. It was used routinely on children.
George Washington, in December 1799, developed a severe throat infection, likely acute epiglottitis. His doctors bled him four times in a single day, removing close to 2 and 1/2 liters of blood from a man already weakened by infection and fever.
He died within hours. The infection probably would have been survivable with rest and fluids.
The treatment finished him. Imagine the cruel irony. The father of a nation killed by the medicine meant to save him.
And then there’s the other side of this. The people who weren’t seeing doctors. The enslaved Africans, the indigenous communities, the poor settlers who couldn’t afford a physician.
Some of them were consulting healers whose knowledge came from entirely different traditions. Herbal remedies that had been refined over generations.
Practices that in some cases were genuinely more effective than what the trained doctors were doing.
Cotton Mather, the famous Puritan minister of Boston, a man responsible for fueling some of the worst hysteria of the Salem witch trials, stumbled onto something extraordinary.
His enslaved man, Onesimus, described a practice he had known in Africa. A small amount of material from a smallpox sore introduced into a cut on the skin could protect a person from the full disease, what we now call variolation, a crude but functional precursor to vaccination.
During the 1721 smallpox epidemic in Boston, the kind that moved through a city like fire through dry grass, killing hundreds, leaving survivors scarred for life, Mather pushed for variolation.
The city erupted. A pipe bomb was thrown through his window. Physicians publicly condemned him.
The idea of deliberately infecting someone with smallpox sounded like madness. But it worked. The people who were variolated died at a fraction of the rate of those who weren’t.
The data was right there. It took decades for the medical establishment to accept it.
Pause and let that sit for a second. The knowledge that could have saved lives was already there, carried in the memory of an enslaved man, and the system that could have used it spent years throwing pipe bombs at the idea instead.
M’kay, now. If you’ve been listening to this and feeling grateful for modern plumbing, you’re not alone.
Drop a comment and let me know. What piece of this story surprised you the most?
Because we’re not done yet, and it keeps going. Disease didn’t wait politely outside the city limits.
It moved through communities the way water moves through cracked stone. Dysentery spread through contaminated wells, through food handled by unwashed hands, through the slow leaching of privies into the water table.
Typhoid followed the same path. Smallpox needed only a single infected person in a crowded church on a Sunday morning.
The mortality rate for children under five in colonial America sits at roughly one in four.
One child in every four dying before they reach their fifth birthday. Not in the abstract, in every family, on every street.
Cotton Mather, the same man who would fight for variolation, lost nine of his 15 children to infectious disease.
He buried them, grieved them, and kept writing, kept preaching, kept watching the next wave of illness roll in.
You don’t have to admire the man to recognize what those numbers mean in human terms.
Nine children, nine funerals, and through all of this, where were the bodies going? The dead were buried in church graveyards, most of them located at the center of town, which made spiritual sense.
Keep the congregation close to the church in life and in death. But it made no sanitary sense at all.
A churchyard fills up. The soil becomes saturated with decomposition, and that saturation doesn’t stay contained.
It moves. It spreads through the soil, down toward the groundwater, toward the wells, or toward the mouths of the living.
Boston’s Granary Burying Ground, established in 1660, sits in the heart of the city.
It holds the remains of Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, names every Canadian schoolchild has heard.
What those schoolbooks don’t mention is that the soil around it, centuries later, still carries chemical traces of what happened there.
Archaeology done on colonial burial sites has consistently found contamination extending outward from the cemetery grounds.
The living built their water sources next to where they put their dead, and they couldn’t see the connection because the connection was invisible.
The entire city was a slow-moving cycle of contamination. Waste in the streets, rain washing it toward the wells, wells feeding the households, households producing more waste.
And at the center of it all, the graveyards adding their own invisible contribution to the groundwater that everyone depended on.
Here’s the thing about the Puritans specifically, and this is something that gets misrepresented constantly.
The popular image is of a deeply clean, morally rigid people who maintained physical discipline alongside spiritual discipline.
That image is wrong. Puritan cleanliness was a spiritual concept. The body was less important than the soul.
A person could be morally pure while physically unwashed, and that was perfectly acceptable theology.
Bathing, actual immersion in water, was considered medically dangerous. Physicians believed that open pores allowed miasma to enter the body.
Cold water was thought to weaken the constitution. A full bath might be taken once or twice a year.
In between, clothing was aired out. Faces were wiped with dry cloths, and that was considered sufficient.
Lice were so common they were essentially treated as a condition of existence rather than a problem to be solved.
Wigs, worn by men of status throughout the colonial period, were often maintained separately from the head, taken off, cleaned periodically, while the hair beneath remained largely unattended.
A Puritan minister could stand at his pulpit on a Sunday morning, clothing unchanged for 2 weeks, hair hosting whatever had taken up residence there, and deliver a sermon about the importance of spiritual purity without a trace of irony.
Because those were genuinely two different categories. This isn’t mockery. This is just what the world looked like before germ theory, before anyone understood that the invisible things were the dangerous things.
Without that knowledge, the entire framework of health and cleanliness pointed in the wrong direction.
And smart people, educated people, followed the framework they had. It would take another century and a half before the picture started to change.
Here’s one last image to carry with you. The year is 1657. New Amsterdam, the Dutch settlement that would eventually become New York City, passes one of the first anti-littering laws in colonial North American history.
The ordinance prohibits dumping garbage, waste, ash, and oyster shells into the public streets.
The penalty is a fine. The law is largely ignored, but it exists. Someone in that settlement looked at the street outside their window, smelled what was happening, and thought, there has to be a better way.
They put it in writing. They made it official. And even though nothing changed overnight, the idea was there.
The seed was planted. Boston would follow with similar ordinances. Philadelphia. The colonial governments were not entirely blind to the problem.
They simply lacked the science to understand its full scale and the infrastructure to do anything meaningful about it.
The real turning point wouldn’t come for another 150 years, and it wouldn’t even come from America.
It would come from London in the summer of 1858 when a heat wave turned the River Thames, which by that point was carrying the raw sewage of more than 2 million people, into something so overwhelming that the windows of the British Parliament had to be soaked in chloride of lime just to make the building usable.
They called it the Great Stink. Parliament, forced to sit inside the problem they had created, finally funded the construction of a modern sewer system.
The same pattern had played out in colonial America, one community at a time. Ignore it until it becomes impossible to ignore.
Then act. The difference is that the people of 1700 didn’t have the knowledge to know what they were ignoring.
We do. Every time you turn on a tap and clean water comes out, something real happened to make that possible.
Generations of people died from things that are now completely preventable. The distance between their world and ours isn’t just technology.
It’s knowledge. It’s the slow, painful accumulation of understanding that took centuries and cost millions of lives.
The toilet you take for granted is one of the most consequential inventions in human history, not because it’s comfortable, because it broke the cycle.
And if there’s one thing this story keeps coming back to, it’s that the things we never think about are usually the things that matter most.
