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FIELD REPORT
Unusual Exhibit Features the Fixtures at the
Business End of the Pipe
The Center for Land Use Interpretation
is dependent on a network of volunteers and supporters all over
the world, many of whom submit information on unusual and exemplary
locations they encounter in their travels. Unsolicited field reports
and site characterizations are welcome, and a list of sites in
specific regions that need further looking into can be sent to
you if you want to volunteer some field research time. Information
packets for field researchers are available by request.
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American Sanitary Plumbing Museum
Photo courtesy of ASPM
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Field Report by John McVey
The American Sanitary Plumbing Museum is located
in an area of Worcester, Massachusetts in which plumbing supply
houses seem much in evidence, and is an offshoot of one plumbing
distributor there, Charles Manoog, Inc.. The main (second) story
of this two-story building houses a collection of plumbing contraptions
of all kinds, such as wooden water mains, toilets, elaborate showerheads,
water heaters, sitz & foot baths, bath tubs, basins, examples
of complex under-the-sink drain configurations, & toilet-paper
dispensers, all from before our time. Here too are a very impressive
run of a plumbing trade magazine from the teens well into the
thirties of this century, and a library of plumbing supply catalogues
and books on sanitary plumbing. The curator, Bettejane Manoog,
confesses to reading the old magazines with understandable interest
when the press of visitors slackens.
The lower floor of the Museum contains other household
sanitation devices, including a very early Kohler dishwasher,
but is devoted mostly to the tools of the plumbing trade, including
manual and motor-driven pipe threaders, wrenches, leadworking
tools, and fittings.
The Museum honors a trade, and is only incidentally
(but not unconsciously) about the curiosity of using water to
dispose of human waste. The Museum also plays a role in the education
of future plumbers at area trade schools. The directors of the
Museum are in contact with other of the world's plumbing-related
museums in Europe and, notably, India.
The Museum is open Tuesday through Thursday, 10-2,
or by appointment.
A number of items from the American Sanitary Plumbing
Museum collection were on display in an exhibit at the MIT List
Museum in 1992, entitled The Process of Elimination: the Kitchen,
the Bathroom, and the Aesthetics of Waste, curated by Ellen Lupton
& J. Abbott Miller.
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