The rickety old Wild West outhouse with a crescent moon cut out of the door is one of the most enduring symbols of the era. It’s one of those images that you remember, but can’t place exactly where you first saw it. Which isn’t surprising, since it probably never existed.
From cartoons to films to modern-day replicas of historic toilets, the cut-out shape of a crescent moon in an outhouse door seems like something that is so ingrained in our cultural consciousness, that it must have existed in real life. But it doesn’t seem to have been much of a historic reality. “I have never—with my own eyes—seen a crescent moon shape in an actual outhouse I could confidently date to earlier than about 1960,” says Dr. Adam Davis of the Missouri Folklore Society. While there’s not a great deal of scholarship on the origins of the crescent moon outhouse, Davis wrote a piece on the subject in 2007. “I have seen more photographs of outhouses where I suspect the decorations to be authentically pre-mass-media that have half-moon cutouts (that is, semicircles) although, interestingly, those are never the icons one sees in cartoons. Similarly, I have seen photos of crescent moons which are entirely horns-up, as if ready to catch water, but that’s not the icon either,” he says.
Having a hole cut out of outhouse doors was definitely a real thing, providing ventilation and light into the stall, but no one is sure exactly where the idea that they were commonly crescent-shaped came from.
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http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/outhouses-crescent-moons
