Lost Stories of Oklahoma: Sod Houses Were Built to Last

As you drive out of the little town of Aline, Oklahoma, heading south on Highway 8, you’ll pass by a nondescript, low-slung building, possibly with several old farm implements strewn about the front. Although it doesn’t look it, this simple structure houses a part of Oklahoma history. In fact, it contains the last intact example of a dwelling common to most of the pioneers of that era. It houses, well, a house! A Sooner homesteader’s sod house, to be precise.

That’s right, a home made almost exclusively of grassy dirt. Considering the prairie didn’t have much in the way of timber, a sod house made good sense. Clearly it made sense to Marshal McCully, a Sooner homesteader who moved to the area in September of 1893. Sooner, as most folks know, is the name given to the pioneers who moved to the prairie in the land run of September 16, 1893. They staked their claim just a little “sooner” than they were supposed to.

Originally, Mr. McCully lived in what was called a dugout—the equivalent of a small cave—cut into the side of a ravine. The sod house, a relatively spacious two-room structure, was built in August of 1894.

The house was easy to assemble and the material was right under McCully’s feet. For the cost of a $10 sod plow and something to pull it, he literally shaved his building material right from the dense buffalo grass nearby. McCully’s plow cut strips 18” wide from the surface. The strips, 4” thick, were then cut into bricks which formed the walls of the sodbuster’s home. Windows and doors were framed from wood and the sod walls stacked around them.

Sod is a fairly dense material. The roots of the grass hold the dirt together, so when stacked, they make pretty solid bricks. Sod is also a good insulator, which was great for those windy prairie winters. Luckily for McCully, the house was also near a creek. This not only supplied water, a very important commodity in the prairie, but this creek was also lined with alkali clay. That was a double blessing as the clay was used to seal the cracks between the sod bricks and the alkaline properties helped keep the bugs at bay.

As heavy as they were, McCully and other sodbusters also used the slabs for the roof. They would position poles across the walls and lay the sod on top. It worked well enough, but since it was dirt, the homes, called “soddies,” were plagued by insects, snakes, and loose dirt falling from the roof. Such conditions would deter all but the hungriest of homesteaders from firing up the stew pot under a sod roof! A blanket or tarp stretched underneath the roof helped, but you still had to watch your head.

When the house was completed, McCully sent for his bride and they set up housekeeping in the sod house until 1909. He built a two-story frame house next to the soddy, which he used as a storage building for many years. The soddy stood, mostly intact, until 1963 when the Oklahoma Historical Society took possession of the building and restored it to its almost-original condition.

Sod houses served a lot of Sooners well for many years. Although they were less than ideal living quarters, they had one thing going for them—they were, after all, dirt cheap!

James R. Smith is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to MetroFamily Magazine.