| Not so many decades ago, settlers and farmers | | | | for something built of prairie grass and Colorado |
| located in the Plains states of America lived in sod | | | | Kansas mud! |
| houses. They were called that because the | | | | The house was actually located almost exactly on |
| exterior walls -- and sometimes even interior walls | | | | the Colorado/Kansas border. My grandparents' |
| -- were built of "bricks" that were a mixture of | | | | homestead split along that state line. As I recall |
| native soil and water, sometimes even chunks of | | | | hearing the story, the house and well were in |
| tough prairie grass embedded in the soil and cut | | | | Colorado and a shed and barn were in Kansas. |
| out of the ground in the shapes and sizes needed. | | | | The whole site was somewhere around 20-25 |
| When I was a small boy, we made a few trips to | | | | miles north-northeast of the small town of Holly, |
| visit my paternal grandparents in southeastern | | | | Colorado. (Holly made national news a few years |
| Colorado and went out of town about 20-25 miles | | | | ago just briefly because a tornado ripped through |
| to the original family homestead, where we were | | | | the little village and wiped out a great deal of it.) |
| shown the remains of the house my father grew | | | | Back to the sod house. I found a very good |
| up in -- a genuine sod house. The house | | | | description of how the early settlers in the Plains |
| (completely gone except for parts of one wall by | | | | states put these structures together. It's in William |
| 1970) was built sometime just after 1900 and my | | | | Foster-Harris' book, "The Look of the Old West," |
| grandparents continued to live in it until sometime | | | | on pages 280-283. If you've been fortunate |
| around 1940-45. (My grandmother harbored some | | | | enough to find a copy of that wonderful book, |
| bitterness throughout the rest of her life toward | | | | you'll see the same section speaks of the early |
| my grandfather for keeping her on that old | | | | dugouts that preceded sod houses, and a brief |
| homestead long after most of his brothers and | | | | description of the ranch houses which generally |
| their families had moved to town. In that case, | | | | followed as a step up. |
| "town" was a village of something less than 500 | | | | In our family's case, my grandparents moved into |
| people.) | | | | Holly and left the old sod house behind sometime |
| I wish I had more memories of that sod house | | | | in the early- to mid-1940s. My father was an |
| from when we visited it, probably around | | | | expert carpenter and woodworker. He hand-built, |
| 1956-57, but I really don't. I must admit, though, | | | | from digging the foundation to shingling the roof, a |
| from my vague memories of the structure still | | | | house for his parents in Holly then and they left |
| standing then, that it was put together pretty well | | | | the homestead behind. |