The Prairie Had No Trees, So They Built Houses of Grass

A quarter section is 160 acres, a half mile on each side. On much of the Nebraska and Kansas prairie in the 1870s, you could stand in the middle of one and not see a single tree.

That was the problem facing a family that had just filed a claim under the Homestead Act. Lincoln signed it on May 20, 1862, and it took effect January 1, 1863. The deal was simple. Live on the land five years, build a dwelling, farm it, and the land was yours. By the time the program wound down, the National Park Service counts roughly 1.6 million homesteads and some 270 million acres passed into private hands.

But a dwelling takes lumber. And the lumber was hundreds of miles east, on a railroad you couldn't afford to ship it on.

The one thing the prairie had plenty of

The grass.

Native prairie grass, bluestem and buffalo grass among them, grows a root mat so dense and tangled that it holds the soil together like felt. Break the ground with an ordinary plow and it fights you. Break it with a proper sod plow, a long, low blade that slices a clean ribbon a few inches deep, and the ground comes up in one piece.

Somebody figured out you could stack that.

The method was the same from Nebraska to the Dakotas. You picked a flat spot, ideally near water and a little above it. You plowed a furrow, then cut the ribbon into bricks, usually around two feet long. A fresh brick was heavy. Heavier after rain. A man lifting a few hundred of them in a day knew exactly what he'd done by evening.

You laid the first course grass-side down, then staggered the next one like a bricklayer, so the seams never lined up. Walls ran two to three feet thick. By the usual reckoning, even a small one-room house swallowed most of an acre of prairie.

A door frame and a window frame were the things you had to buy, along with a stovepipe if you could afford one. If you lived near a creek, you might cut cottonwood for a ridgepole. If you didn't, you hauled it, or you got by on whatever you could scrape together.

What the walls actually did

The soddy wasn't a stopgap born of desperation alone. It solved real problems.

Prairie fires moved fast and burned hot, and a house of dirt doesn't burn. The wind that hammered a frame house on open ground slid off a wall that thick. In July, the interior stayed noticeably cooler. In a January blizzard, it held heat far better than the thin boards a family might have nailed together.

That last point mattered on January 12, 1888, the day known as the Schoolchildren's Blizzard. A warm morning turned into a wall of snow and a brutal temperature drop across Nebraska and the Dakotas. Hundreds of people died, many of them children caught on the way home from school. Families who were inside a thick-walled house when it hit were far better off than those caught out in the open. The prairie that nearly killed so many also supplied the walls that saved others.

The part nobody photographs

Here's the honest side of a soddy, and the people who lived in one were the first to say it.

The roof was the weak point. Poles or brush, then straw or grass, then a layer of sod on top. When it rained, it leaked. When the rain stopped, it kept leaking, because a roof that thick held water and dripped it for days. Dirt sifted down into the food. Mice lived in the walls. Snakes sometimes came through the roof. Families tacked muslin across the ceiling to catch the fall, and it helped, mostly.

The floor was packed earth. Women swept it, wet it, and swept it again. Many plastered the inside walls with clay, or whitewashed them, and anyone who has tried to keep a dirt house clean will understand the stubbornness that took.

And it didn't last. A soddy might stand a few years, or a decade or more with steady repair. Nobody planned on it being permanent.

That's the point. The sod house was a bridge. You lived in the ground until the first good crops paid for a frame house, and then you moved up the hill and let the old one go back to grass.

Even so, a few soddies endured. Some stood, with repairs, for decades. A handful survive today, protected by museums and historical sites.

The record, and the faces in it

We know what these homes looked like because of a photographer named Solomon Butcher. Starting in 1886, he traveled Custer County, Nebraska, with a camera and a wagon, and he photographed families in front of their homes. The Nebraska State Historical Society holds the collection today.

Look at those pictures. The people stand straight. Children are scrubbed. Sometimes the family pushed the good furniture out into the yard so it would be in the shot. Cattle graze on the rooflines. Nobody smiles much. Cameras then required you to hold still, but you also get the sense these were people who didn't think the occasion called for a grin.

They had a roof, a team, and a claim. They were proud of it, and they had reason to be.

For the women who kept those homes, the pioneer women who wrote it all down tell it better than anyone could secondhand. If you want the same instinct in a different uniform, read about the man who slept in a tent until his men had roofs.

What it cost, and who paid

Not everyone made it. Many claims failed. Grasshoppers swarmed the Plains in 1874 and 1875 and stripped fields to the ground. Laura Ingalls Wilder's family lived through that in a dugout near Plum Creek, Minnesota, which she later wrote about in On the Banks of Plum Creek. Droughts in the 1890s emptied whole counties. Debts piled up. Children died. People gave up and went back east, and nobody should sneer at them for it.

And the land itself wasn't empty. The Plains had been home to nations like the Lakota, Pawnee, Cheyenne and Arapaho, and the country opened to homesteaders came through treaties, pressure and war. That's part of the record. A history that skips it isn't worth reading. You can honor the courage of a farm family and still tell the truth about how the ground became available.

What you can take from a house made of dirt

Look at what those families didn't do. They didn't wait for lumber. They didn't wait for the railroad to come to them or for someone to fix the problem. They looked at what was under their boots and started cutting.

They also didn't pretend the house was better than it was. They knew it leaked. They knew it was temporary. They built it anyway, because a leaking roof you've built beats the perfect house you're still waiting on.

And they did it as families. A husband cutting sod, a wife plastering walls, children hauling water. Neighbors turned up to help raise a roof, because everybody knew they'd need the same favor in a year. That wasn't sentiment. It was the only way the settlement survived.

Walk that country today and the soddies are almost gone. The roots in the soil are still there. So are the farms that soddies made possible, still planted by the great-grandchildren of the people who cut the first brick.