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sod house |
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sod house, house with walls made of strips of sod laid horizontally in courses like bricks. Sod houses were common in the frontier days on the western plains of the United States, where wood and stone were scarce. The sod, turned by the plow and held together by roots, was lifted in strips and usually cut in 3-ft (1-m) lengths (sods). The walls were hewed smooth with a spade and were often plastered with clay and ashes. Sometimes roofs were of frame construction; usually they were thatched or covered with sods, which had to be replaced after heavy rains. Sod walls were fire- and windproof and good insulators, but they permitted only small window openings. For other earth houses, see rammed earth rammed earth, material consisting chiefly of soil of sufficiently stiff consistency that has been placed in forms and pounded down. It has been used for buildings and walls since ancient times and was employed in some of the most ancient fortifications in the Middle ..... Click the link for more information. . BibliographySee E. Dick, The Sod-House Frontier (1937). How to thank TFD for its existence? Tell a friend about us, add a link to this page, add the site to iGoogle, or visit webmaster's page for free fun content. |
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Emma Draper, her father, her brother, and her seven children, ages one to 13, spent a year from June 1886 to June 1887 in a small sod house on the barren plains of what was then the Dakota Territory and is now north central South Dakota. This comfortable site is an illustrated essay on the American pioneer sod house, the soddie of south-western Minnesota and western Nebraska, which 'was common from the earliest days of settlement to the early years of this century'. Grace McCance's father moved his family from a more civilized Missouri to Nebraska in 1885, settling in a one-room sod house with no water supply. |
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