COMSTOCK, Neb. (CN) — Although Nebraskans grow up learning about the sod houses of their ancestors, few may consider a key drawback of them: Wildlife could burrow right inside.
That was definitely a concern of Florence Dowse, who once lived with her husband William in the Dowse Sod House outside Comstock. According to family history, she was once at home alone when a bullsnake got in and made its presence known.
“Grandma hated snakes — and she had to deal with them all the time,” granddaughter Dory Sutton, 70, said in an interview. Florence Dowse was sewing one day, “and she kept hearing the shade rustle.” When she got up and inspected, she found a snake. “So, she got the ice pick and stabbed it.”
As settlers arrived in the Great Plains after the Civil War, they found themselves on prairies mostly barren of the trees needed to build wood homes.
The result was the sod house, a unique type of structure built from soil-carved brick. Though largely forgotten in an era of modern construction, these sod builds were once common throughout the Great Plains, which stretches from Texas and through Nebraska all the way to the Canadian prairie in Saskatchewan.
Without sod houses, building on the Plains would have been financially impossible for a wide swath of new arrivals, many of whom were showing up from Europe with limited means.
For these new Americans, hauling in lumber “would have been quite pricey and out of reach,” LuAnn Wandsnider, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor of anthropology who has studied sod houses, said in an interview. Thus, were it not for sod houses, “you wouldn’t have had the kind of diversity we see on the Plains, in terms of people coming from around the world.”
Colloquially known as “soddies,” the epicenter of sod-house construction in the late 19th century was right here in Custer County, a square of rolling hills near the dead center of the Cornhusker State.
Large numbers of settlers began arriving in this still-unorganized territory in the 1870s, following the 1862 passage of the Homestead Act during the Abraham Lincoln presidency. Under the law, new arrivals were entitled to 160 acres under a few conditions, including that they inhabited the land and made improvements on it.
Those conditions came with a conundrum: How would homesteaders stake out a home on the treeless prairie?
Growing up in Nebraska, one is sure to learn the answer.
According to lore, regular wildfires in the Plains kept big, lumber-bearing trees from establishing roots. But there were still the roots of the Great Plains’ ubiquitous grasses, which gave area dirt the strength and flexibility needed for brick-making.
That's a bit of an oversimplification — there were some trees here, especially along the Middle Loup River which bisects Custer County — but the lore mostly gets it right. Sod thus became the dominant material in Great Plains houses.
“We didn’t have railroads, we didn’t have trees,” explained Tammy Hendrickson, curator of the Custer County Historical Society and museum in the county seat of Broken Bow. “Almost every homestead started with a sod house, because that’s what you had.”
The best source material usually came from so-called buffalo wallows, depressions on the Plains where water collected. The sod there held more grass and was therefore stronger, said David Murphy, a retired research architect who has studied sod houses for the past 50 years.
There were few if any professional sod house builders. Instead, neighbors helped each other with this difficult and dirty work.
"The sod house was a lot of intense labor,” Hendrickson told Courthouse News. “It did not come in a kit that said 'some assembly required.’” Making the process even more difficult were the multitude of languages spoken at the time on the Nebraska frontier. One can imagine a dusty scene with lots of rudimentary hand gestures.
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