Pioneer Sod House
Near Boulder, Colorado
Lumber was available in the Denver area, so almost nobody built sod houses here. Almost nobody. James Baugh had come to Colorado Territory from the treeless High Plains, where settlers had no choice but to cut bricks from the thick-rooted prairie grass beneath their feet.
When Baugh settled near what is now Wheat Ridge, he built the way he knew how: walls of native sod thirty inches thick, held in place by hog wire. The structure is listed with a date of eighteen eighty-six, though some historians think it is older, and it kept a family warm through Colorado winters with almost no other building material at all. It is likely the only surviving sod house in the Denver metro area, and it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-three.
