The Sod House Years — Building a Home Out of Dirt

A homesteader arriving on the central and western Plains faced a problem the law had not anticipated: there were no trees. East of the hundredth meridian a family could fell timber for a cabin, but out on the open grassland of Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas, and beyond, there was nothing to build with but the prairie itself. So that is what they built with. The first homestead house was cut from the ground — thick ribbons of root-bound sod sliced up with a breaking plow, chopped into bricks, and stacked grass-side down into walls two to three feet thick. People called the material ‘Nebraska marble’ or ‘prairie marble,’ half in pride and half in rueful joke.

The sod house, or ‘soddy,’ and its even humbler cousin the dugout — a room hollowed into a hillside or creek bank — were the universal first chapter of life on a treeless claim. They cost almost nothing but labor, and they were genuinely well suited to the place: nearly fireproof against the prairie fires that swept the grasslands, and so well insulated by their massive earthen walls that they stayed warmer in the killing winters and cooler in the summer heat than any thin frame shanty. For a poor family with five years to prove up and no money to spare, the soddy was not a quaint choice but the only one.

It was also, by every honest account, a hard place to live. The dirt roof — sod laid over a frame of poles and brush — leaked. In a heavy rain it leaked for days after the sky had cleared, dripping mud onto beds, tables, and food, and women stretched muslin or cheesecloth across the ceiling to catch the constant fall of dirt. Snakes, mice, fleas, and insects lived in the walls and roof. The floor was packed earth. And yet families were born, raised, married, and buried out of these houses, and many a homestead that eventually grew into a prosperous farm began with a hole in a hillside and a wall of grass.

We know the sod-house years with unusual vividness because one man set out to photograph them. Between the 1880s and the 1910s, a Custer County, Nebraska, photographer named Solomon D. Butcher hauled his camera from claim to claim and made thousands of glass-plate portraits of homestead families standing proudly before their soddies — the organ wheeled outside into the light, the milk cow posed by the door, the whole family in its Sunday best against a wall of dirt. His surviving collection is the great photographic record of homestead life, and it is the backbone of this entry.