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“As far as I’m concerned I was happy there,
and I never thought too much about it. We took it for granted.”
I had asked Bernice Larson, who raised her family in a sod house in Bowman
County, North Dakota, in the 1940s and 1950s, what it was like to live
in a sod house in the middle of the twentieth century. Was this a hardship,
I wondered? Did she feel deprived? Evidently not.
Ordinarily we think of sod houses as temporary expedients, dwellings laid
up to fill residence requirements for homesteads, then replaced with proper
frame houses when railroads and sales of the first crops made lumber available.
It’s interesting and, I think, significant that some families deliberately
chose to remain in their soddies. They bought window glass, laid down
wood floors, plastered the interior walls, stuccoed the exterior, and
most important, put on a tight roof of wood shakes—and then enjoyed
the advantages of earthen insulation against the hard elements of the
plains.
Bernice Larson was the daughter of homesteaders, Melvin and Jennie Torpen,
from Wisconsin. She grew up, a few miles from her future sod-house home,
in a family of three daughters. “I usually helped my dad milk, because
the other two girls were in the house,” she says. She met her future
husband, Clark Larson, at local dances held in barns and homes. She married
him in 1940. In 1942 they moved onto a rental farm—the residence
of which happened to be a sod house, previously occupied by the owners.
“It was in fairly good shape,” Bernice recalls. The main part
of the house comprised three rooms—a bedroom on the north side, a
dining room on the south side, and a living room in the middle. A coal
stove in the wall between the living room and the dining room heated the
house, and also the water for washing. Attached to the west side of the
house was a wood-frame addition, which served as kitchen. Outside the
kitchen door was a windmill. Bernice lived in the sod house from 1942
to 1960 and never had running water. She did, however, get electricity
in 1950.
Bernice repainted the interior, with the living room receiving a coat
of ecru. She made curtains and laid rugs on the living room and bedroom
floors. The kitchen floor was linoleum. That was where people dropped
their boots and coats—“Seems like we always found room—I
don’t know where!”
The house did get a little cramped as the family grew—four children,
the oldest born in 1942, the youngest in 1953. This necessitated folding
beds in both the living room and the dining room. Eventually the Larsons
moved, not only to get a larger house, but also to buy a farm of their
own.
In the meantime, Bernice was not a complainer. “Of course the walls
weren’t really even,” Bernice allows, but, “It was a warm
house. It was very nice, because the walls were thick. It was nice and
cozy. And I had more company then than I did in later years.”
That last sentence is a clue, I think, to why people hold fond memories
of sod houses. It may be that sod had its environmental advantages, but
recollection of those physical facts is wrapped up with remembrance of
the social situation of generations past—lots of kids around, dances,
school events, and most of all, gatherings of family and neighbors in
the house.
“I had so many relations, and we used to get together,” Bernice
Larson says. “And my neighbors, we had good neighbors. A lot of visiting,
card playing. They brought all their children.”
The sod house where Bernice Larson raised her family and played cards
with the neighbors still stands, in good condition, uninhabited.
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