ALINE—Imagine being 26 years old with only a quarter in your pocket, running to stake a claim during the Land Run of 1893 in the middle of a vast prairie east of what became the town of Aline.
That’s what Marshal McCully did.
All he owned to his name was a two-wheeled horse-drawn cart with a bedroll and a tiny bit of food that his mother gave to him for his journey. He carved out a dugout hollowed out of a ravine bank to shelter in while he constructed his home—which stands today as Oklahoma’s only intact sod house, preserved in the exact location it was when McCully built it.
Renee Trindle, site manager aka director of the Sod House Museum along State Highway 8, said the sod house, or “soddy” as its often referred as, offers a glimpse of the hardships and prosperity Oklahoma pioneers had in the Cherokee Outlet.
When McCully arrived, he found like every settler in the plains aiming to start a new way of life that there was very little timber, unlike the state of Washington from where he had been logging the past eight years.
The scarcity of lumber could have proved challenging for him and the thousands of others like him. But they took a note from those who had first settled the area—the Osage, Pawnee, and Hidatsa tribes who had constructed their homes out of sod bricks cut from the fertile grasslands—and duplicated that method.
An estimated 1 million soddys were erected in the Midwest during the late 1800s and early 1900s. However, only a few are still standing today, but most are partial or in pieces or have been concreted over, Trindle said, which is what makes the McCully’s sod house so unique.
Even the original plow McCully used is on display at the Sod House Museum.
Making sod blocks wasn’t difficult, but it was tedious digging in the buffalo grass and clay.
Sodbusters like McCully would furrow slice the densely packed grassy soil (aka sod) into strips, usually one foot wide, 18 inches long, and four inches thick. They would then cut the strips into blocks (aka bricks) and stack them to make the walls of the house. Bricks were laid grass-side down and placed alternately lengthwise and crosswise or staggered to increase the strength of the wall.
It could take up to one acre of sod to create a house, which obviously meant days or weeks of hard labor in sodbusting and assembling to achieve the desired result.
“You would only plow the amount of sod you needed that day, otherwise it would dry out,” Trindle said. McCully used 96 tons of sod, roughly a half-acre, to cover his home.
The efficiency of the walls kept sod homes naturally cool in the summer and warm in the winter, making them superior to future homes built with lumber, which provided no insulation.
McCully split poles from the trees he acquired—“he had to go far east” to get them, Trindle said—and laid them across the top of the walls as rafters before laying 12-inch sod on the rafters to form the roof. All 7,000 pounds of sod on the roof held the house together.
“This house is luxurious,” Trindle said, describing what sets this sod house apart from others elsewhere: the size, the wall treatment, the flooring, and the windows.
Most sod houses were a single dwelling with rooms or spaces separated by blankets; in this 12-foot by 25-foot sod house, there are actual walls to separate the two rooms.
McCully utilized the alkali clay (salty soil per se) on his property to plaster the inside walls to help keep insects and other varmints out, which was a definite problem for other sod houses. This plaster unintentionally helped preserve the sod house long-term, whereas most sod houses crumbled after a few years.
And while most sod houses had a hard-packed dirt floor, McCully installed a wood floor in 1895 at the behest of his first wife. According to Trindle, he had given her a choice: wood floor or tin roof. She chose the wood floor.
Because he wasn’t married yet, Trindle said, McCully did sharecropping in Kansas so he could import glass windows out of Wichita for his house. Most sodbusters crudely constructed window frames themselves.
McCully married his first wife, Sadie, in 1894. She gave birth to his firstborn, a daughter they named Letha, in 1896. Having ill health, Sadie passed in 1902 at the age of 32.
McCully remarried in 1907 to his second wife Pearle, not long before Oklahoma transformed from a territory to a state. Pearle gave birth to a son, Thomas, two years later, but he died as an infant. She then gave birth the following year to McCully’s second daughter, Louvisa.
The McCully family only lived in the sod house for 15 years, until 1909, when they built and moved into a two-story wood-frame house just west of the soddy.
Louvisa Elliott commented during an interview in 1987 said that her parents “hurried the building [of the frame house along] so I wouldn’t have to be born in a soddy. … My half-sister, Letha (Clawson, who died in 1962), was born in the sod house.”
Although Elliott never lived in the sod house herself, she told stories of how she and her friends used it as a playhouse, and that it also served as the family’s storage shed. Trindle added the sod house also served as a hatchery for the McCully’s chickens for a time too.
Elliott’s mother died in 1957 and her father died in 1963. She allowed the sod house to be sold to the Oklahoma Historical Society shortly after her father’s death “so people could learn about sod houses,” Trindle said, adding OHS had previously tried to purchase section of land with the sod house on it from McCully himself but he refused.
Elliott’s daughter, Norma Jean Kiner Wharton, lived nearby, so her grandfather often visited. He reportedly was visiting his granddaughter, Trindle said, the day his wood-frame house caught fire; McCully was actually living in the sod house at the time of his death at the age of 95.
Wharton died in 1998 and Elliott died in 2001. Elliott’s grandchildren, thus McCully’s great-grandchildren, Phil Kiner and Mark Kiner, have shared numerous tales with Trindle through the years about growing up around the sod house.
One such story involves why a corner of the sod house is noticeably damaged. The tall tale version is a bull dented it scratching his back. The true story version is the boys were messing around with a tractor that backed into the sod house, but they didn’t want to get in trouble, so they told the tall tale instead.
As part of the restoration, the Oklahoma Historical Society enclosed the sod house in a special humidity-controlled building to ensure it would endure for generations to come. Visitors to the Sod House Museum get to experience it inside and out, up close and personal.
Both rooms have been restored as authentically to what it would have looked like in the early 1900s. The stove is the original one the McCullys used. In the bedroom, the organ is reminiscent of the one his first wife had, and the headboard is identical to the one McCully used. McCully’s second wife chose to wall paper the plaster walls with red wallpaper, so there are nods to that as well.
Also enclosed in the museum is the family’s original root cellar, constructed in 1911. Museum grounds include an additional building displaying horse-drawn equipment and farm implements from that era.
To commemorate the sod house’s 130 anniversary this year, the museum has Christmas trees throughout decorated in quilt blocks such as log cabins, stars, and patches along with seasonal decorations on display.
“A Quilter’s Christmas” open house is set for Dec. 14 from 1-3 p.m. and admission is free. Friends of the Sod House Museum will celebrate the milestone with cookies, cider, and door prizes. Visitors can buy raffle tickets for a queen-sized quilt with the theme of “chickadees and trees” that was designed by the Sod House Quilters. Tickets are $2 each, three for $5, or six for $10. The Silver Strings and Friends musical group will perform a variety of instrumental music throughout the day and visitors may join in.
Sod House Museum’s regular hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is $7 for adults, $4 for children; special rates apply for seniors, military, and groups. Call (580) 463-2441 for group and school tours.