devoted to the city’s poor farm. Others could be exchanged with farmers:
Any cart entering town with a load of hay for the stable, for instance, or pro-
duce for markets should return home full of treated ‘‘manure.’’
However censorious he was on the subject of exposed private parts of hu-
man bodies, Ruffin was impatient with the prevalent taboo against fertiliz-
ing food and fiber crops with human wastes. The Chinese did it, but more
important to the Eurocentric Ruffin, Europeans, notably the French, had
long been at the business of creatingpoudre(dried manure) and simulta-
neously rendering cities sanitary. He discovered and reprinted an pre-
sentation to the Agricultural Society of Pennsylvania that included a trans-
lation of a patent on apoudremethod by one M. Donat. Ruffin, who was
competent in French, believed he had read a better treatise on storing and
recycling wastes. This was the edition of Francois Rozier’s encyclope-
dicCours Complet d’Agriculture,Theorique, Practique. .. (originally –).
So Ruffin translated and published Rozier’s descriptive critique of the en-
closed waste pits, orfosses d’Aisance, of French rural villages. Into these were
deposited the bodily wastes and kitchen and other refuse of entire human
communities, along with the wastes of domestic and farm animals and,
apparently, offal and parts of animal carcasses. Accumulations effectively
cooked themselves in their own hot gasses until annual cleanings, when
the nitrogen-rich product was returned to nature, in this case the soils of
crop fields. There were dangers in attending and emptying thefosses: Accu-
mulated methane gas caused many poisonings of workers who opened the
sealed lids of pits, and there were occasional fatal explosions. However,
Rozier maintained, well-constructed community pits might easily be safely
managed. Methane should be carefully released before excessive buildups,
and foul odors might be neutralized by regular applications of lime. Lime
—calcium carbonate—was the savior again. Ruffin well understood that
American farmers did not live in villages. But Rozier’sfosses d’Aisancebore
more than passing resemblance to Ruffin’s proposed privies for the streets
of Petersburg.
Ruffin did not directly address standing, often putrid water in cities, al-
though this problem is more than implied in his urban essays. He was a re-
lentless advocate of drainage. Elsewhere he campaigned for years against
rural standing water, especially the thousands of small millponds dotting
the tidewater Virginia countryside. Without understanding that a species of
mosquito,Anopheles, incubated in such waters and injected into humans
the malarial virus, Ruffin rightly associated still, fresh, standing water with
disease. Alas, as with the majority of his many proposed reforms of farming