Sod House Construction
Sod houses were the first dwellings for many Nebraska pioneers. Descriptions of these homes can be found in reminiscences written years later, but there are few accounts ...
sod house
What We Found
Hayes County Thanksgivings
Thanksgiving, with its combination of patriotic and religious sentiments, was a most popular19th-century American holiday. Only July 4th was more widely observed. Even ...
Lightning Rods
Enough damage has been caused by lightning to haystacks, barns, farm animals, and houses to make Nebraska farmers aware of the danger. During a thunderstorm overhanging ...
Dugout Construction
The dugout was a makeshift, temporary home and a predecessor of both the sod house and the log and frame house in early Nebraska. Such shelter was more easily made than ...
Cherry County Stories
"In the early eighties a colony of homesteaders from Sullivan, Indiana, under the leadership of a young Methodist minister, Rev. Scamahorn, came to Gordon and settled in ...
Flashback Friday: Historic Soddies as Modern Dwellings
Can you imagine living in a sod house—not as a pioneer, but as a modern person? Some people do, and some e pioneer-era soddies survive as modern dwellings.
A ...
Bat and Bible
With the family Bible on father’s knee and a baseball bat under the youngest daughter’s chair, these Nebraska homesteaders are ready for anything Custer County can pitch ...
A Tombstone and a Blizzard
Chicago man who tried to drive a buckboard twenty miles through a blizzard on the Nebraska prairie and his narrow escape from death.
Many tales of ...
Flashback Friday: A Time Capsule Made of Sod
The NSHS recently assembled a team of scientists, historians, and local volunteers to salvage a sod house wall for study. The remnant of a 1903 Custer County sod house ...
Silly Structures or Artful Architecture?
Can you tell what this building is supposed to be?
A strange alien, a bizarre monster? It is a restaurant shaped like a mug (or at least it's supposed to look that ...
Benton Aldrich was a difficult neighbor—but his dugout sod house was one of Nebraska’s best libraries
Benton Aldrich was man who got on other people’s nerves. He registered the deed to his Nemaha County farm in his wife’s name so she could vote in school elections. He ...
A Dugout Flood
Imagine yourself as a pioneer living in a hole in the ground. Now imagine that floodwater is rising toward the ceiling. Welcome to rural Boone County in 1873.
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