Tag: folklore

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Ancient Web: The Outhouses of America Tour Has Been Online Since 1996

The Outhouses of America Tour was created on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1996, which is almost too perfect an origin date for a website about outdoor toilets.

Visit the Outhouses of America Tour

The site says it began as a joke and then kept going until it became a genuinely large collection devoted to outhouses, backhouses, loos, and related sanitation history.

Its navigation includes real outhouses, definitions, FAQs, trivia and folklore, models, postcards, sketches, outhouse racing, outhouse digging, and visitor submissions.

That is significantly more outhouse infrastructure than most people expect to encounter before breakfast.

The joke became an archive

The strongest old-web sites often begin with a subject too narrow to justify a conventional publication. That is exactly why somebody can cover it properly.

The Outhouses of America Tour preserves examples from different regions and contexts, including restored structures, homemade buildings, unusual designs, military sanitation, and historically associated sites. One featured entry points to an outhouse connected with William Faulkner’s Frenchman’s Bend display in New Albany, Mississippi.

The archive also wanders into composting toilets, humanure, preparedness, and practical sanitation, which makes sense once the joke has accumulated enough real information.

The page openly asks visitors to send photographs of their favorite outhouses, especially ones they built or restored. That participatory model is pure personal web: a curator picks an odd subject, strangers discover it, and eventually the audience helps build the collection.

The site calls itself the home of a comprehensive outhouse information collection and proudly notes that it has been in business since 1996.

More importantly, the HTML still carries the shape of that era: image buttons, long navigation, visitor comments, small jokes embedded in labels, and a curator persona rather than an anonymous publishing system.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many sites where an absurdly specific interest becomes valuable simply because someone refuses to stop documenting it.

Twenty-nine years after launch, the Outhouses of America Tour is still standing.

That sentence is doing more work than intended.

Return to the Outhouses of America Tour

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Ancient Web: Pagat Has Been Cataloging Card Games Since 1995

If somebody teaches you a card game at a kitchen table, there is a decent chance the rules exist on Pagat in a version assembled from people who actually play it.

Visit Pagat

John McLeod founded the site in 1995 with a simple goal: document traditional card and domino games so players could discover unfamiliar games and preserve the rules of ones they already knew.

Three decades later, the structure has become enormous without becoming mysterious.

You can browse alphabetically, by number of players, by region, by mechanism, by objective, or by equipment. There are sections for solitaire, dominoes, proprietary games, invented games, children’s games, poker variants, and traditional games that rarely make it into mass-market rule books.

Folk knowledge with an index

Card-game rules are slippery historical material.

Families change them. Regions use different names. A game moves across borders and picks up local variations. Sometimes two groups use the same name for noticeably different games.

Pagat’s value is not merely that it posts instructions. McLeod explicitly credits readers from around the world for sharing information about the games they play and helping expand the site.

That turns the website into something between a reference manual and a long-running collection of living folk rules.

The name “Pagat” comes from the lowest trump in the Central European game Tarock. That is exactly the sort of fact you wind up learning because somebody maintained a specialist website for thirty years.

The site was still actively updated in September 2026.

From a webmaster’s perspective, Pagat is also a good example of why deep classification matters. A giant subject does not have to become unusable if readers can approach it from several sensible directions. “I have four people and a normal deck of cards” is a perfectly valid navigation problem, and the site has an index for that.

This is one of the sites gathered in CacheRat’s larger Ancient Web research list for people who want the source corpus rather than individual guided stops.

Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list

If you vaguely remember a card game from childhood, learned something strange while traveling, or simply need something better to do with a deck than another round of poker, Pagat is still doing its job.

Browse the card-game rules at Pagat