The Middleton Place privy is a modest one-story building half hidden in live oaks behind the Middleton House museum. It has outlasted many of its more imposing contemporaries to become one of the oldest standing structures at Middleton Place. Built in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, the privy was one of the few plantation buildings to escape destruction by Sherman’s troops in 1865. In its long lifetime it has served as an outdoor latrine, a generator house, and a storage building. Now, newly equipped with running water and flush toilets, it is the only antebellum building at Middleton Place still serving the purpose for which it was constructed. An outdoor privy may seem an unlikely place to conduct an archeological excavation. Much eighteenth and nineteenth century trash was simply tossed out the back door, but the backyard privy, ready made for waste disposal and usually handily located a few dozen feet from the house, also received its share of household disposables. As a privy pit neared abandonment, the top layers were often stuffed with broken objects before it was sealed and a new hole dug. The privy is set solidly atop a rectangular brick-lined pit, which house servants kept open and functioning for more than 100 years with a system of “honey buckets.” When the privy was finally abandoned in the 1920s, the entire pit, not just the top few inches, was packed with broken or unusable household goods. The privy pit was sealed by J. J. Pringle Smith, who laid a concrete floor in the privy building and converted it into a shed for the plantation’s first electric generator. With the subsequent arrival of outside electrical power, the generator too was abandoned, and the privy stood undisturbed for the next 40 years. In 1978 workmen remodeling the building into a modern restroom broke through the concrete floor to the artifact-laden pit below. The artifacts were excavated and analyzed by archeologists from the University of South Carolina’s Institute of Archeology and Anthropology, and are now on display in the Middleton Place Spring House Museum. Privy pits, being relatively shallow, normally contain objects accumulated and discarded within a very few years. The Middleton privy, only three feet deep, was expected to be no exception. Once the artifacts had been cleaned and restored, however, it became apparent that this was no short-term kitchen deposit, but a diverse assemblage of objects spanning more than 100 years of the plantation’s history.