The House of Sod

In the 1860s, the federal government came up with a plan to encourage settlement of the West by offering free land to settlers who were willing to stake a claim. Each family was offered 50 acres and received a deed to the land after 5 years of "proving it up." Many of the settlers were European immigrants who read about the offer in their homelands and came to America to strike it rich as land barons. They got the land they wanted, but with the land came a hard life of survival on the Great Plains. Because they could be constructed with little cost and with available resources, sod houses became a popular dwelling type among the settlers. We visited a sod house in Gothenburg, Nebraska, a community founded by Swedish immigrants. Up to nine people lived in this house, which consisted of two rooms and an outhouse. The black and white photo shows a typical sod house from the 1880s.