The homesteader who reached the open plains faced a hard problem before the first crop: there was no wood to build with. The solution lay underfoot. The tough, root-bound prairie sod, cut into thick bricks with a special plow, could be stacked into walls, and so the first houses of the treeless country were built from the very earth the settlers had come to break.

A House Cut from the Prairie

The sod house — the soddy — was warm in winter and cool in summer, cheap and fireproof, but it had its miseries: it leaked mud when it rained, it harbored insects and snakes, and it never quite felt clean. Families lived in them for years, papering the walls with newspaper and dreaming of the frame house that a few good harvests might buy.

From the almanac's reckoning:

• Homesteaders built houses of sod bricks where no timber grew.
• Sod houses were warm and fireproof but leaked mud in the rain.
• Frame houses replaced the soddies once lumber arrived by rail.

As lumber arrived by rail and crops came in, the soddies gave way to wood, and most melted back into the prairie from which they were cut. The almanac remembers the sod house years as the hardest and most ingenious chapter of the homestead era.