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Bob Crager
Bob Crager of Lewis Street Glass is a 26 year veteran in the glass business. Lewis Street Glass is a leading Wichita Glass company, serving the entire Wichita/Sedgwick County area since 1919. They do anything and everything having to do with glass, both residential and commercial. They also do Auto glass. They are located at 743 South Market, facing Kellogg on the South, and you can reach them by phone at (316) 263-8259. You can email Bob Crager at bcrager@lewisstreetglass.com
Glass
2005-09-01 07:39:00
Sod houses on the plains
ANSWER: I found some interesting information on the net, and thought I would share some of it with the readers. One of the biggest attractions of the prairie lands for those planning to file on a homestead was the lack of trees, resulting in no roots, stumps, and seedlings on the land. Good for farming! The big disadvantage was the lack of materials to build a house. Lumber could be brought in by wagon or train, but that was expensive. The only cheap material on hand was the earth itself. Even if a settler did build a house of logs or boards, very often their animals would live in those made of earth. Plowing the grass produced a mat of grass roots and earth up to 4 inches thick and 18 inches wide. This was cut by axes into manageable lengths of sod, and used in the same way as bricks are used to build a house. So that the wall of earth would not be too high and unstable, settlers sometimes dug into the earth and laid the floor 4 feet below the ground. This allowed less of the exterior to stick up out of the earth. Sometimes a sod house or "dugout" was made by removing earth from a creek bank and then building just the front wall and roof. Gaps were left for doors and windows in the same way as for an ordinary house. It was easy enough to build a door into a door frame and to put window frames into place but getting glass could be difficult and expensive. Those folks would have loved the windows we have today! Due to those circumstances, oiled paper was sometimes used instead of glass. I like it better the way it is today!  The roof was usually made of twigs and thin branches from any available trees. Straw was piled on top of these branches and then finished off by laying more sod sections on top. Leaks? Oh yeah...Conditions inside the house largely depended on how well it had been built. Poorly built sod houses would let rain in through the roof. Care had to be taken that the walls were built straight and that each layer was secure. It was not unknown for poorly built sod house walls to collapse! A really big mess! Inside, the walls could be smoothed with an axe. A layer of mud and clay could be applied to give a more pleasing finish. The walls could then be white-washed or covered with newspaper. The smell of the earth was always there with you though. And unlike today, with low-e windows available everywhere, they had to burn lamps, rather than getting the great light of the sun into the interior of their homes.Another alternative was to build a cubic frame inside the house and cover this with paper. In that case, one had to be careful not to put an arm or foot through it! The earth would be very moist at first, leading to rather damp conditions inside the house. Very heavy rain would cause high humidity inside. In summer the sod house was an excellent cool shade from the fierce hot sun. In the winter it kept the heat in and the cold out. During exceptionally bad brutal winters, often the only people to survive were those in the sod houses.
 
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