Prairie Homestead: The Sod House That Survived
Near Wall, South Dakota
A few miles north of the town of Interior, near the Badlands, stands one of the few remaining sod homes in South Dakota, listed on the National Register of Historic Places and open to the public. The Prairie Homestead Historic Site preserves a sod house built in nineteen oh nine by a homesteading family that claimed a quarter-section of land under the Homestead Act and tried, like thousands of others in this era, to make a farm out of the high plains. The house is built from blocks of native prairie sod cut from the ground and stacked into walls roughly two feet thick.
Sod construction made practical use of the only building material available on the treeless plains: the earth itself. Sod walls were cool in summer and insulating in winter. They also leaked in heavy rain, hosted insects and small animals, and slowly deteriorated as the grass roots died and the blocks crumbled.
The homesteading family that built this house lived in it through the wet years, then through the beginning of the dry years, and eventually left like so many of their neighbors when the land could not support them. Walking through the low-ceilinged rooms today, you can feel how small the shelter was for a family that had come a long distance to build a life here. The isolation of the original homestead, visible as an unbroken horizon in every direction, is clearer from inside those sod walls than from a car window on a modern highway.
