Many farmers who sold milk door to door tried to keep the milk clean. This was hard to do. In the 1920s, Elizabeth Spraklin was a young mother in St. John's. She always bought her milk from one farm family because they also sold milk to a butter company. She thought their milk would be safe for her children to drink. Some of the people who ran this farm got scarlet fever, but they still sold their milk. This was probably the only way they could make a living. Scarlet fever is caused by a kind of bacteria that can live in milk. Soon, three of Elizabeth Spraklin's four children got scarlet fever too. The youngest child, a little girl, died. After this happened, the Public Health Office had the barns pulled down and this dairy farm was closed.11

Summary Of Life In St. John's
People living in a city like St. John's had many problems. It was hard to keep clean without running water. Many of the houses that people rented were not fit to live in. Raw sewage and garbage lay in the streets, making it easy for diseases to spread. Food could not be kept fresh. The milk that they bought might be unsafe to drink. It was very hard, or even impossible, to keep children clean and healthy.

Life in the Outports

Water and Sewage
People who lived outside St. John's had to carry water from streams, ponds or wells. Many did not have good drinking water. Wells can go dry, or get bacteria in them. People could build outhouses, but if an outhouse is put in the wrong place, it can ruin someone's drinking water. There are also lots of places in Newfoundland where you cannot dig an outhouse because of the rocks, so some people did not make outhouses. One woman remembered:

There were no washrooms or even outdoor toilets, in those days, almost seventy years ago. Girls were compelled to hide under a fish flake or behind an old building. It was not too comfortable with a gale of north wind and snow blowing straight in from the bay.. .but it had to be done and no one died on the job or went on strike.12

This raw sewage made it easy for diseases to spread.

11 This story was collected in an interview with Elizabeth Spracklin by Janet McNaughton in St. John's on May 16, 1986.
12 Rhoda Maude Piercy, "True Tales of Rhoda Maude, Memoirs of an Outport Midwife", Janet McNaughton, (Occasional Papers in the History of Medicine, number ten, St. John's: Faculty of Medicine, Memorial University, 1992), p.10. Mrs. Piercey is retired, a store owner and a midwife who lived in Winterton most of her life. In her book, she writes about life in Winterton and how it changed over the years.