SOD HOUSES OF THE PRAIRIES

Hawera Star, Volume LI, 11 June 1932, Page 14

SOD HOUSES OF THE PRAIRIES

A sod-house, such as the first settleps of the prairies used, is to he built in Topeka, Kansas. It will enable tourists to visualise the conditions endured by the pioneers, says the “New York 'Times.” The project is under the direction of the Kansas State Historical Society, which Is conducting negotiations with sod-house builders of the old days. Lem Pogue of Dodge City, who is something, of a specialist in sod houses, is believed to be favoured for the job. Lem Pogue has several modern sod houses to his credit, for, as the Topeka project shows, 'they are now being built as examples of a curious offshoot of American architecture. Travellers to the prairie States from Kansas to the Kakotas may see old sod houses of the IS6o’s and 1870’s still standing. Some of them even continue to be used as homes, becauso their owners prefer them to wooden houses.

The homesteaders who rushed westward in increasing numbers after the Civil War found the rich prairie land lacking m only one essential —lumber. To the Easterner who had usually been forced to clear his land of timber before he could begin to plant, this treeless, fertile plain seemed ideal. As the saying went: ‘"God done His best on that there land—'His level best.” But wood could not be obtained only with great difficulty, and usually only

Crude Hornes of America’s Pioneers

“If they have money they buy, at the nearest railway station, lumber for house-building, already so far manufactured that they need no carpenter to set up their dwellings. But poorer men throw up sod houses. The greensward turned up by the breaking plough is so ‘ma'tted and massed together’ as to form better brick than the Hebrews turned out for Pharaoh, even before he denied them straw. Out of this material, and with no tool but a spade, many a man by ten days’ labour has completed a house, roof and ail( 15 by 15 feet inside) —a Nebraska ‘brown front’ both warmer in winter and cooler in summer than any house which can be made for sale in all stores, and trees alongside every brook afford rafters. ’ ’

the richer settlers could afford to build entire houses of it. In these circumstances many of the others were forced to use prairie sod. • In a pamphlet on Nebraska written for the information of emigrants in 1 : 573, and quoted in “The Pageant of America,’’ James D. Butler gives this description of the homesteaders and their sod houses:

Sometimes sod houses were built against the sides of hillocks. This afforded protectipn from gales and. cyclones, and meant that one side at least of the little house would not have to be constructed. Others ' were partly caves. -y