An Affordable Rammed Earth Home

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Building a rammed earth home requires you to tamp a lot of dirt in a form like this one. PHOTO: MOTHER EARTH NEWS STAFF

This article, which appeared in the May 1950 Coronet, is copyright © by Esquire lnc. and is reprinted with permission. 

Thirteen years ago, a Coronet article changed my life!

Thirteen years ago, my wife and I were hard-up, rent-paying tenants in a crowded city. Today we are independent and secure in the Pennsylvania countryside. We own, debt-free, a $15,000 home. And we did it all on a modest income.

How can I credit this independence and security to a Coronet article? It was called "Houses of Earth," and the author maintained that anybody could build his own house. All you did was erect wooden forms on a foundation, pound in four-inch layers of dirt, and you would have a rammed earth (or Pasé de Terre) wall.

Pisé, it developed, was an ancient and honorable building method, almost forgotten today. As soon as one form was full of rammed earth, you moved it and rammed another section, and so on until the wall was complete. As simple as that. Easy, cheap, and permanent, the article said.

And every word was true. Our rammed earth home is warm in winter, cool in summer. The foot-thick walls are proof against vermin, termites and fire, and will stand for centuries. And they were easy and cheap to erect, just as the Coronet article stated. I know, because I have built our home—during my spare time!

There is nothing remarkable about me. I am just an average fellow: a salesman, 37 years old, weighing 163 pounds. I am five-feet-eleven, and have the usual number of hands and legs. It just happens that I used my spare time to build a home of rammed earth.

Our house does not appear unusual. Without knowing its history, you would drive by and notice only an attractive home with clean, simple lines. It is big, but it hugs the ground with an air of belonging. And it is filled with modern appliances that we were able to afford because we saved so much by using the construction methods we did.

And if we built a home that way, you can too. Here's how we happened to get started ....

Betty read the Coronet article first. "Look," she exclaimed, "the author says that anyone can build a home of rammed earth."

"Not me, honey," I replied. "The only thing I ever built was a birdhouse, and the Scoutmaster said the comers weren't square."

But Betty was insistent, so we read the article again and then went to the library for more information. It still sounded simple. Centuries-old houses made of rammed earth were still standing, in good repair. The only objection, we found, was that the method took more time and labor than conventional techniques.