34 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



Except in such cases the sewer from the house to the point where the 

 sewage is disposed of should be made of four«-inch vitrified sewer pipe. 

 It should be laid very carefully to line and grade and the joints should 

 be very thoroughly cemented with a rich Portland cement mortar. To 

 lay the sewer to grade the only proper way is to tightly stretch a cord 

 parallel to the grade line and have it supported say every twenty-five 

 feet. Then by a suitable measuring stick every pipe should be laid 

 exactly to the proposed grade. Unless the fall is very rapid it will pay 

 to have the grade stakes set for the sewer by a surveyor. It will take 

 only an hour or so of his Lime to have this done unless the sewer is very 

 long. The sewer should be given a fall of two feet to the hundred, if 

 possible, and certainly not less than one foot to the hundred. While 

 four-inch sewer pipe is ample in size yet there is no special objection to 

 using six-inch, if desired. 



This leads us to the question of what is to be done with the sewage. 

 The most common means of disposing of the sewage of cities is simply 

 to discharge it into some considerable stream, and in a small propor- 

 tion of cases it may be possible for the farmer to do the same thing. If 

 he is located near a stream of considerable size he could discharge his 

 sewage into it with greater justice and less danger of doing injury than 

 in the case of a city. Of course, however, a great majority of our far- 

 mers are not located sufficiently close to a perennial stream to enable 

 this to be done. 



In some cases ravines or dry ditches may be located sufficiently near 

 so that the sewage could be drained into these. Under such circum- 

 stances careful consideration should be given to the possible damage from 

 stock drinking the sewage. One of our Iowa cities now has a judgment 

 against it for some $4000, I believe, for injury mainly to stock from dis- 

 charging its sewage into a small stream which ran through a pasture. 

 In another case known to me a valuable herd of blooded stock con- 

 tracted disease from drinking sewage from a ditch below the outlet of 

 a city sewer. 



In a very large proporiioa of Iowa farm homes it will be > t-ces^H-y for 'he 

 farmer to dispose of his sewage by other means than simply discharging 

 it into a stream or ditch. The old means used in such cases was the 

 construction of a cesspool, and instead of. making this cesspool water- 

 tight it was undertaken to make it as porous as possible so as to avoid 

 the expense and discomfort of having to clean out its contents at inter- 

 vals. Such "leeching cesspools" are often more objectionable on account 

 of polluting the surrounding wells than is the privy vault, for the quan- 

 tity of material discharging into them is increased many fold by the 

 water from the plumbing fixtures, and consequently the pollution is car- 

 ried further into the surrounding soil. I have known of cases in locali- 

 ties having limestone rock underneath where the individual householder 

 congratulated himself because his cesspool had an outlet into some 

 seam in the rock. Perhaps on an adjacent lot, or even on his own lot, 

 was located a well and it is quite possible that this same seam in the 

 rock communicated directly with the well. In one town in this state it 



