19th Century expansionist fever fueled the Manifest Destiny pioneer fervor that drove thousands to go westward ho in droves to escape the crowded cacophony of the eastern seaboard cities. It was urban claustrophobia that injected the narcotic drug of pioneer spirit in Americans who were looking for a better life in the vast continental interior thanks to the Homestead Act that dangled free land as the carrot on the stick to encourage new settlements for America. The young nation was flexing it's muscle to stake it's claim on lands not yet claimed by Spain or France, yet, in the process ejecting those Native Americans who already called the prairie lands home. Home where the buffalo roam, and home where generations of Native culture has flourished, now about to rounded up and placed on hold on reservations and it's peoples assimilated leaving their cultural heritage behind, lost in history forever.
The flotilla of Conestoga wagons, which were the Airstreams Trailers of the era set a course for a voyage across the prairie, forming the Oregon Trail and the Santa Fe Trail, names as familiar then as Route 66 would become in the 20th Century. These trails were the "highways" of the tall grass. Many opted to settle in places like Nebraska, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Kansas and Minnesota without venturing to the golden promised lands of Oregon or California. Yet, these area's had little in the way of building material for homesteads. The Southwest had adobe, the Eastern cities were made of wood and soon brick and mortar. The prairies on the other hand were seas of grass, thick rooted sod, acres and acres of endless sod filling a landscape that seemed limitless. The new pioneers were an ingenious lot and borrowed from the homesteading history of the Vikings and the Inuit peoples of the far north, and became Sod Busting Homesteaders! Remember, there was no wood for fires so these innovative Americans used buffalo and cattle dung for heating fuel! You do what you have to do! Sod and dung, the yin and yang of prairie life!
The soddies s they were called, were extremely cheap to build with a ready supply of prairie that stretched from horizon to horizon, or so it seemed at the time. (In time the grasses were plowed under for farming in a most unsustainable way, and the result was the Great Dust Bowl storms of the Thirties!) The Native Americans knew to leave well enough alone!
The homes were well insulated and the insides were generally lined with thick, heavy canvas, however one major drawback was that insect infestations and snakes were problematic.
Examples of the early Viking attempts at sod built villages is recreated today at L'Anse Aux Meadows in New Foundland in the great white north of our Canadian neighbor. The Vikings, even when in Greenland with it's geo-thermal superstar sustainable status, were big fans and innovators in "green roofing" practices and dwellings. This is the only known site of a Norse Village in North America. At one time in the village, it had three log houses and a sod longhouse. They had inner frames of wood with sod exteriors, and the structures were further "greened" by being built into the hillside adding a "bermed" touch to the construction for further insular values. The Vikings, lived in Greenland for over 400 years, making journeys to North America, or what the called Vinland because of the profusion of grapes that proliferated in the new world. Eventually around the year 1400, they disappeared and perhaps continued pillaging and plundering in Valhalla!
Norse to Alaska, and all things Arctic tempered by a lack of timber in the tundra. The Inuit intuition was to make do with what you have and not dwell on that which you do not. The ingenious indigenous Inuit's constructed sod domes that were covered with a layer or two of insular snow pack. This structure was further enhanced with the addition of small tipi built over the entrance and served as the cooking area as the inside of the sod dwelling was enclosed and not escape route for smoke, nor loss of heat! These peculiar structures where shaped like a large cross with a central room (for socializing and religious ceremonies) with alcoves off to the side that contained benches and/or platforms for sitting and sleeping. Families and neighbors sometimes shared these structures as there was not building material available to build a New York City in the land of ice, snow and Polar Bears!
The floors were interesting as they were dug into the ground, thereby reducing the amount of space that had to be heated, and the entrance to the sod structure was built below floor level so that the heavier cold air from the outside would be trapped here and the heated air would stay inside the dwelling. The walls too were sloped to further reduce the amount of space to be heated, and all that was needed to increase heat in the home was an oil burning lamp!
Sod houses were a fact of life and not choice on the prairie. It was hard and tedious work to break the soil that held the sod in place and to put it into perspective for those fans of "This Old House" it would take a full acre of sod just to construct a one room home. The Bravo Channel home improvement teams would have a field day trying to makeover this fixer upper! All this was originally done by hand, and was back breaking work to say the least, but as progress moves along at a vigorous pace, technology eventually won the day when a new plow was introduced that broke the sod into workable strips for construction.
If you would like more information on sod home construction there is an excellent site online to visit at http://www.wilderness-survival.net/shelters-shacks-shanties/sod-house.
The techo-sod secrets are public knowledge, and if there is a bit of Laura Ingalls Little House on the Prairie inquisitiveness then you should load up the modern vehicular version of the Conestoga Wagon and make tracks to the Sod House Museum in Aline, Oklahoma just west of Enid. The displayed sod house was built in 1894 and although the family moved into a two story frame house they built in 1909, the soddy was used for storage until 1963! The sod house today remains and is preserved to protect it from the elements and the ravages of age. You can visit the museum and take a few steps back into time. Pioneer times, a time of adventure, exploration, boom and bust, wide open spaces, where you left the confines of the every encroaching urban tentacles of the east, to make your mark on the continent. Dammit, you were no longer a city slicker, but a real honest to goodness bonafide sod busting pioneer! !