The scarcity of timber in the West meant that settlers could not easily or cheaply build a typical log cabin. The sod house, an austere dwelling built out of the earth itself, supplanted the log cabin in the West and became a symbol of the hardscrabble existence of the western settler. These settlers staked their claim on land, and then built homes made of the land.
The first sod houses appeared in Kansas during the 1850s. To make a sod house, a settler simply plowed the ground and used the furrowed sod to make bricks. The bricks, similar to the adobe clay bricks found in some Southwestern dwellings, were a yard long, 12 to 18 inches wide, and three inches thick. Roofs were crafted using layers of brush and grass and a final layer of sod, with the grass side down; a more expensive version used lumber or tar paper in place of the grass or brush. Some interiors featured plaster covering the sod walls, but windows and window frames proved to be a luxury, so sod houses usually had little light or ventilation. A one-room house used approximately a half-acre of sod.
Sod houses were either free standing or built into a hill. The dugout variety involved excavating the side of a hill or ravine and building a front wall out of sod bricks. Dugout homes lasted only a season or two and generally served as interim dwellings until a four-wall sod house could be built. A regular sod house was expected to last about six or seven
Sod schoolhouse (National Archives)
Years. The structures looked like grass huts, as the organic sod bricks sprouted grass as well as insects and vermin. Although the sod protected homes against fire and made them easy to repair, leaking tended to be a problem, and its inhabitants constantly checked walls and ceilings that were in danger of caving in. Successful settler families eventually built traditional homes, although they continued to use “soddies” for livestock or outhouses.
Further reading: Everett Dick, The Sod-House Frontier, 1854-1890 (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1937).
—Scott Sendrow
World History
