In the nineteenth century, women, who were uprooted from
their families and hauled into primitive conditions, had to make due with the
housing structures their husband’s provided.
Their first home once they arrived to their location could
be a tent, a one room log cabin with no
doors or windows or floor, mining shacks with dirt floors and canvas ceilings,
flimsy tar-paper shacks, dark and desolate dugouts or soddies. The men were
busy staking claims, putting in crops, or working jobs and only came home to
sleep. The manner of the house didn’t matter to them.
But the woman spent every hour of every day in the home
other than the hours her chores took her outside. Reading letters by some of
the pioneer women it is easy to see how their dreary conditions would be hard
to handle. Especially if they had
several children in a small drafty, leaky home.
One woman used grass and fern mixed with mud to fill the
cracks in the walls and floor to keep out the drafts, vermin, lizards, and
snakes. Many of the floors had cracks so large the eating utensils would fall
through the cracks and the boards would have to be pried up to retrieve the
tableware.
Another family decided to move to a larger parcel of land
and to save time of building another house, they pulled the 12’ x 12’ chicken
coop to the new site. Before she could get her things moved in pack rats
dragged in their sundry plunder. They
cleaned out the debris and the rats and lived in the building with five
children. The woman didn’t like the gray
walls and smell of chickens so she covered the walls with newspapers. Later the family moved into a more permanent
living quarters. This building had a ceiling made of muslin tacked up to the
plaster. When it rained hard the muslin would hang down with mud in it,
dripping dirty water on everything. After every rain they would have to take the
muslin down and wash it. She whitewashed the walls and as the family became
more prosperous she bought calico cloth, sewed it together and tacked it to the
walls. The one front room window had a cheese cloth curtain she attached
crocheted lace to. When she desired a
nicer place for her babies to play than the rough plank floors, she spent a
winter making a carpet from rags. She even went to the dump and dug out flour
sacks that she died a dull brown using copper.
One woman sewed sheets together to tacked them up between the
joists of the cabin to make the home more cozy and less drafty. A woman married
to a civil engineer, used his geological survey maps to line her walls.
In South Dakota there were the “tar paper homesteaders”.
These people had the choice of lining their interior walls with red or blue tar
paper. The red was thinner and cost three dollars a roll while the blue was
thicker and six dollars a roll. Everyone knew the difference in quality and
cost so the blue paper on walls became a sign of class on the frontier.
Source: Pioneer Women; The Lives of Women on the Frontier by
Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith
12 comments:
Paty, I have a family document in which a woman tells of her family moving from a tent to a soddy. Her brother with asthma was so sick in the soddy that he had to live in the tent until the father could construct a new home. Aren't we fortunate to have a real home with real windows plus a/c, heat, and nice kitchen? It's no wonder life spans were so short for many pioneers.
Caroline, That's true. I'm sure living conditions played a large part in many of the deaths.
I'm going to remember the sod walls and tar paper liner next time I need to paint the living room.
I've been doing some research on sod houses since one figures prominently into my current story. Some of them were turned into real homes. They did sometimes have actual windows. There are also references to the fact they were warm in winter and cool in summer - after all, the walls were more than a foot and a half thick - and that in some blizzards and extreme cold those who died were often the ones in wood homes, while those in soddys survived.
There is a sod house here in Colorado still on the tax rolls and privately owned. From the picture, the sod must be insulation inside a stucco outside (and probably plaster inside).
All good information, Paty. The one about the family losing tableware through the cracks reminds me of a saying around here from back in the old days. It had to do with having cracks around the door "so big, you could throw a cat through them." Like all the old houses around here back then, my grandmother's house didn't have a speck of insulation in it. So, nearly every spring the women papered the walls. They never took the old off, just added more. If you put your hand against the walls, they were spongy with all those layers of paper. And of course, they would go up like a torch if they caught fire. Thanks for a great post! :)
LOL Alison.
Ellen, Sod houses were great insulation but from what I've read they also had varmint issues of the furry &I scaley kind.
Devon, I'm sure s lot of our sayings come from how people lived years ago. Thanks.
Hoo boy... not the kind of stuff I'm used to, for sure! Glad I only have to write about that time, not live it. Great post, Paty!
Thanks Meg. I agree!
Great post! I think too, they had issues with leaking during rain storms. Ugh, what they had to put up with back then. We've seriously got nothing to complain about. Eh?
Ciara, yes! I don't think I'll ever complain about anything in my house after reading all about what the pioneer woman put up with.
There were soddies and there were sod houses. My great uncle explained how to make a sod house that was durable and comfortable. (I still have his diagrams around here somewhere.) The sod house they made in 1918 was still in use when we visited Nebraska in 1967. Driving up, I thought it was a stucco house. It had large windows, a front and back door, a nice porch, and a shake roof. We didn't get to go inside but my uncle said the whole thing was plastered and painted. This is a far cry from the soddies that we generally think of, and the first time I ever had actually seen one. My g-uncle and my grandfather both preferred sod houses to any other structure because they were cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
Jacquie, I saw the different types in the book. That would have been fun to see a sod house.
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