Homeland – Fall 2023 | Building History: Sod Walls and Appreciation for Pioneers
Custer County, Nebraska, has been called the ‘Sod House Capitol’ of the world. While most newly built homes sport vinyl siding and sheetrock, walls are currently going up on the area’s newest soddy.
Rick Maas is the visitor center coordinator at the Sandhills Journey National Scenic Byway Visitor Center at Broken Bow, Nebraska. The sod house being built there is Rick and Mike Evans’ brainchild, but they’ve had a lot of help over the last several years as the project has gone from “good idea” to actuality.
Kevin Cooksley’s family has deep roots here. Custer County was established in 1877. Cooksley’s great-grandmother and her brother homesteaded 16 miles northeast of Broken Bow in 1878, five years before Broken Bow was founded in 1883 and eight years before the railroad came in 1886.
Mary Frischkorn was a pioneer school teacher. She and her brother Theodore, “Thee,” left their roots in Beaver County, Pennsylvania to come to the Nebraska Sandhills. Thee was a builder by trade, and Kevin shared a photo of the siblings sitting in front of their sod house.
“Thee built barns,” Kevin said. “He built the house that my family currently lives in, possibly around 1895. It’s a big two-story house with a concrete wall basement. The man who remodeled it for us in 2014 said that it was the best built house he had ever worked on.”
Mary died 21 years before Kevin was born, but his mother, Mary Bell Haumont Cooksley, had some memories of her father’s mother.
“Mom remembered her as a very stern person; she was not one of those people who are all warm and fuzzy,” Cooksley said. “Mary was a woman with a lot of starch. Very proper. By that time mom lived on the ranch and her grandparents lived in town. In the 1920s you didn’t go to town all that much when you were 16 miles out. Mom was only nine years old when her grandmother died so she didn’t have a lot of memories.”
Mary’s brother Thee never married, but romance came Mary’s way through a neighboring homesteader.
“My great grandfather-to-be, Jules Haumont, emigrated from Belgium with his brother Edmund in 1879,” Kevin said. “He took up a claim five or six miles northwest of Mary and Thee’s homestead. The closest post office was about three or four miles to the southeast of both claims. The way my grandmother told the story, Jules would ride his horse down there to post a letter or pick up mail, and one day he stopped here and asked if he could water his horse. Mary noticed that he had a bandage on his hand, and asked if she could change the bandage for him.”
Mary and Jules married about three years later. Cooksley speculated that it must have been an interesting courtship, as Mary spoke German and Jules spoke French! Their only son, Frank Haumont, was born in the sod house on Jules’ homestead in 1894; they also had three daughters. Frank attended Nebraska Wesleyan University 1913-1917, where he met Hetty Bell. Frank enlisted to serve his country in World War I after he graduated, and after the war returned home to the ranch. Frank and Hetty were married in 1919. They started a herd of purebred shorthorn cattle and raised their family on the ranch. Their daughter, Mary Bell, would become Kevin’s mother.
The Custer Economic Development Corporation owns the property where the sod house is being constructed. The Red Barn Visitor Center is located on the east side of Broken Bow, and the sod house is located on the same land. Rick Maas takes care of it, and he and Mike Evans are both on various committees with the organization.
“The Red Barn is Rick’s baby,” Evans said. “I love history and so does he. Seven or eight years ago, we were both on a CEDC committee, and one day while we were in a meeting, I said to him, ‘We’re famous for Solomon Butcher’s photos of Custer County’s sod houses; we need to build a sod house.'”
Born in what would become West Virginia in 1856, Solomon Butcher came to Nebraska in 1880. He discovered that the life of a homesteader was not for him, and also developed a profound respect for the hardy and tenacious people of the plains. He set out to document the settlement era, creating over 3000 photographs between 1886-1912. Butcher died in 1927, and is buried at Gates, Nebraska, about 25 miles from Broken Bow. He felt that his life was a complete failure, but his photography has kept the history of the American West alive.
Now Evans and Maas are, quite literally, rebuilding a piece of that history.
Three out of Mike Evans’ four sets of great-grandparents lived in sod homes. While the soddies were standard construction practice during homestead days, building them is a lost art.
“Sod houses are what Custer County is known for,” Evans said. “But there’s not a lot of information on how to build them. It’s been no picnic. Nobody around knew how to do it. We had to research what we could and figure out what we couldn’t find answers for.”
The sod houses of Custer County were built of necessity. Trees were scarce and sod was plentiful. Thee and Mary’s ridgepole was sourced from 40 miles away, near Victoria Springs, where tall pines grew.
Maas and Evans feel the significance of the historic ridgepole.
“It will be our crowning jewel,” Maas said.
Thee and Mary’s sod house was torn down over 100 years ago, but the ridgepole had been saved all those years. Kevin and Shannon Cooksley were part of the sod house committee, and thought that it would be appropriate to donate the ridgepole for this project.
“It’s been quite an awakening for us as we help build this sod house,” Cooksley said. “Laying up sod walls is backbreaking work. Imagine how hard it would be when they didn’t have mechanization. It has been an educational process for all of us. Standing inside those walls is like being in a fortress.”
The sod house is 16 feet by 20 feet on the exterior, with interior dimensions of 12 feet by 16 feet. Two-foot-thick walls lend to good insulation quality in both summer and winter. As the walls go up, it is evident that the pioneers living in their soddies would stay cool in the summers and warm in the winters. There would be no wind howling through the cracks. Cooksley said that helping with the project is truly bringing history to life for them.
As Evans and Maas got serious about their idea, they originally hoped to use a team of horses and a grasshopper plow as their pioneer ancestors did.
“I’m into antiques and I had a grasshopper plow already,” Evans said. “I put new handles on it but I wasn’t sure who was man enough to handle it. I knew it would take someone who was more of a cowboy than I am to handle a team and break sod with the plow.”
Evans happened to be visiting with a friend who told him he’d invented a sod cutter that mounted on his skid steer. Typical sod cutters go just below the roots. Evans explained that for making sod bricks, the sod needs to be cut 2 inches below the roots to get into the mud. His friend’s invention did exactly that.
Several years of drought in a row put the project on hold. The ground was so hard that they could not get the sod cutter into the ground.
“We were pretty much set up,” Evans said. “We decided that whenever we got some rain, we would build the house. In the meantime, we read a lot, and Rick Maas and I went a looked at sod houses that had fallen down, checking out the thickness of the bricks and how they tied together in the corners, and observing what we could.”
Rick Maas worked in the lumberyard business for years, so he had plenty of experience planning building projects.
“When building a sod house, not much of that applies,” Maas laughed. “It’s different. Nobody’s done it before. Roger Welsch’s book, Sod Walls, published in 1968, gave us interesting descriptions of the process. We also looked at sod houses still partially standing in our area.”
Without a ‘how to’ manual, Evans says they have learned a lot by trial and error. When five inches of rain fell in 10 days, following the driest April on record since 1885, it was time to start building. Maas said that over 40 volunteers showed up, with 30 to 35 people present each day.
“After the sod was cut into 1-foot-wide strips, we used an edger spade to cut the strips to length to make 2-foot-long individual bricks. The strips were put onto boards, which were set on a pallet so they could be lifted by a skid steer with forks and put onto a pickup to be hauled to the house site. We lifted the boards onto the wall to put the bricks in place. It got progressively harder as the wall grew higher.”
Maas and Evans had noticed that the sod bricks in the walls of the old sod houses were laid with the grass side down, although this was not explained in any of their research.
“We think we discovered the reason,” Evans said. “With the dirt side up you can chisel it off with a corn knife or other tool to make it level. Even though our bricks were pretty uniform we still had to do that. It must have been integral knowledge so people felt no need to explain the reason for it.”
The team chose to cut their sod on the west side of the visitor center property, where it is a mixture of brome grass and bluegrass. The area had been cut for hay just a few days before they started cutting the sod. The volunteer crew laid up 22 layers of sod bricks in two days.
“We noticed that the walls had a Jell-O effect; the bricks weighed nearly 85 pounds apiece and were full of water,” Evans said. “It hit us after a while that back in the day, a pioneer would probably get up in the morning, hitch up his team, lay over the sod. Then he had to cut it into bricks, then carry it to the home site. It was probably a man working with his wife and kids, or maybe with a neighbor or brother-in-law, not a crew like we had. He might get a layer done in a day, maybe two or three layers at most. Then it would have time to settle and dry out before more layers were added.”
They quickly realized that they had better slow down and do some reinforcing while it dried down and stabilized. After giving it some time, they are pleased that the walls are settling straight down and staying square. Once they feel it has settled completely, they will add more layers on the walls, complete the gable ends, and build the roof structure.
Evans and Maas appreciate the continued support from the community for the sod house project.
“People would hear about it and come up to us wanting to help,” Evans said. “They would tell us that their grandparents or great-grandparents lived in a soddy. We have had incredible support and enthusiasm from people who showed up to help or gave us donations. The ridgepole donated by the Cooksley family will be our crowning jewel when we put the roof up.”
Evans said that they will hold a celebratory open house this fall after the sod house is completed.
Maas is pleased that the sod house has already attracted visitors even though it is still under construction.
“We have gotten so much attention just from people driving by,” he said. “Lots of people have stopped; our visitor count is increasing. We happen to be a passport stop in the Nebraska tourism program. We are on the Sandhills Journey National Scenic Byway. Highway 2 runs right through the Sandhills, from Grand Island to Alliance; the sod house will be a significant draw to the byway, Broken Bow, and other towns along the way.”
Maas has gained a greater appreciation for the strength of the pioneers through the sod house project.
“People back in that day had to be tough,” Maas said. “They were doing this without machinery or technology, and neighbors were so far apart that they probably didn’t have forty people showing up to help.”
Kevin Cooksley says that he has gained a deeper gratitude for his ancestors’ sheer determination to carve a life and a home out of the sod.
“Projects like this help us remember how much they sacrificed and give us a new perspective on what they did,” he said.