The Frontier Dugout
(Page 2 of 2)
Walls of the sod houses were lined with newspapers pasted
or pinned up with small, sharpened sticks to keep the, dirt
from brushing off. Some of the more ambitious families
located outcroppings of limestone rock which they burned
and mixed with screened sand to make a plaster coating for
the walls.
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The dugouts were amazingly comfortable homes; cool in
summer, snug and easily heated in winter. The thick sod
walls and roof made excellent insulation in a day when few
knew or appreciated the value of insulation. When properly
located on the south side of a low hill, with adequate
drainage to provide run-off for rain and melting snow, the
dugout was probably as comfortable a home as any our
pioneering forefathers ever knew.
Unfortunately, the pioneer dugout had a very short life. It
couldn't stand prosperity. The fertile Nebraska prairie sod
– turned over in the fall and broken down to mellow
richness by winter snows, freezing and thawing –
produced bumper crops of corn and small grains. With money
in the bank, the status symbol was a clap board house and
grandma couldn't be satisfied until she had gotten her
family out of "that hole in the ground" and into her
uninsulated clapboard structure: A house that was stifling
hot in the summer and poorly heated in the winter by
buffalo chips in the kitchen range or costly storebought
coal that had to be hauled from town, carefully hoarded and
sparingly doled out.
Prosperity put an end to the dugout in little more than a
decade of pioneering, but a few pictures still exist to,
show how these homes looked and memories and journals of
the oldtimers record the dugout's comforts and advantages .
. . advantages that are still available to today's
pioneers, homesteaders and freedom folk who want to get
away from big city congestion and find a quiet, simple life
close to the land.
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