10. The streets of the cities and towns were filthy
Before the onset of the automobile led to a new kind of traffic, animals dominated the streets of towns and cities across the United States, and not just in the form of horses and mules. Livestock, including cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats, were driven down city streets on the hoof to meet their fate at meat packing plants. In some cities, such as Cincinnati and St. Louis, pigs roamed the streets freely for decades, their usefulness in consuming garbage noted by local leaders. Live chickens were kept in many yards, a source of fresh eggs for the more successful and affluent citizens. Cities were festering sites of animal and human waste, most of it dropped untreated into streams and rivers, where it flowed downstream. Up to what became known as the Gilded Age most homeowners relied on what can be called outdoor plumbing, even in the largest cities.
The combination of raw sewage, human waste, and animal waste, not to mention the frequently encountered dead horses and mules in city streets, frequently left where they lay, meant that the cities of the United States – especially in the warmer months – were reeking cess pools. Public health and sanitation facilities were non-existent for most of the nineteenth century or at the very best were inadequate to the task. American cities were unhealthy places, as evidenced by the numerous epidemics of typhus and cholera, as well as other diseases, which plagued them. The threat of being stricken by an infectious disease which medicine didn’t understand and could do little about was a fact of life, which people could do little about besides abide.