One popular resort shows some marked improvements. While some of the large hotels have still rows of cess-pools, they are kept in better condition than formerly. Still it has not equaled expectation in its efforts to provide a much needed system of sewerage. The hotels exhibit some of the very best and some of the very worst methods for the disposal of water-closet refuse. In one hotel enormous brick vaults had no modes of ventilation, and nothing but the shortness of the season protects the inmates. These New Jersey resorts are no worse than those in other states, and as a rule are salubrious and most desirable retreats, but the self-satisfied carelessness of some wealthy owners of hotel property has made light of these defects, and they have been tardy in their correction. Visitors in such hotels, before taking rooms, should have an expert make a sanitary inspection in their behalf.
These facts from different states clearly show that the sanitary condition of summer resorts is the question of first importance to all who frequent them, and that a rural location, naturally salubrious, has often proved a death-pool when made the home of a dense crowd in the hottest months of the year. This frequent outbreak of preventable diseases in large watering places proves the necessity of applied hygiene in such resorts, where the management often betrays gross ignorance or carelessness on this vital point.
In this respect the Assembly grounds at Chautauqua form a happy exception. Some details may suggest the changes and plans needed elsewhere. Last summer, while meeting lecture appointments there, I made a cursory inspection of the grounds around each of the four hundred and twenty-eight cottages in this “city in a forest,” including its numerous boarding houses. The village is very compact, and the cottages are sometimes too closely crowded together. But everywhere the sanitary conditions are admirable. The three essentials—pure air, pure soil, and pure water—are well assured. Special effort is made to guard these three “Ps.” No old fashioned privies are now allowed. The last two nuisances of this sort were removed while I was on the grounds. Some ten public vaults are located at convenient points, each built of stone or brick, laid in cement, and thus made water tight. Each is daily supplied with disinfectants, and emptied every other night, and then well cleansed with water. There are sixty-seven private vaults, made in like manner, water tight, and frequently emptied. The water-closet pipes emptying into them are said to be all carefully trapped. The waste is conveyed by night to farms far away from the grounds.
Every family is required to provide a barrel for garbage, kitchen slops and wash water, which is emptied daily. No soiled water may be thrown on the grounds. The daily inspection detects any violation of this rule. There are no alleys, lanes, back yards or dumping grounds where garbage can be thrown and secreted. There is no filth-saturated soil, and the atmosphere is not tainted with the gases of decay. The decaying leaves, so abundant in this forest city, are removed or burned.
Numerous wells, carefully guarded from surface drainage, and eight springs furnish pure water. Borings some thirty feet deep, near the engine house by the lake, have opened three flowing springs, the water in five-inch pipes rising seven feet above the lake. This proves to be a mineral water (pronounced by Dr. Edwards, the lecturer on chemistry, a wholesome chalybeate tonic), is forced into a large tank on the hill, and thence distributed in pipes near the surface over the grounds free to all. There was little to criticise in the sanitary condition of the grounds, and the few suggestions which I made were promptly carried out by the efficient superintendent.
WAYSIDE HOMES.
BY HELEN CAMPBELL.