ALINE, Okla. (KFOR) — Marshal McCully made ‘The Run of 1893’, the one that opened the Cherokee Strip.
He lived in a dugout just like thousands of other settlers that first year, but he found a good patch of buffalo grass near his homestead.
He plowed it up, and built himself what a lot of his neighbors thought was the nicest house for miles around.
“The size of it is 12 feet by 24 feet,” says historian Renee Trindle. “It’s a two room sod house which is truly luxurious for that time. Most soddies were nothing more than one room.”
Trindle has done a lot of studying about this earthy piece of history, even speaking to a few of McCully’s descendants to learn about the unique structure than still sits on its original location.
“He went a mile north of here,” she says. “Plowed it, cut it into blocks, loaded it onto a wagon, and then brought it here to build.”
She found the original plow that pulled the earthen bricks from prairie soil.
The walls were interlocking stacks of them more than 30-inches thick.
“The soddy was still warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer,” Trindle says.
Marshal and his family had to hang sheets from the ceiling to catch bugs and chunks of dirt but they still had shelter.
“Most sod houses lasted three to five years max,” she continues.
The railroads eventually came with the lumber to build wood frame houses.
Marshal finished his in 1909 having lived 15 years in his true prairie home.
Trindle argues, “The techniques he used added to the preservation.”
By the early 1960’s, it was the only one left standing anywhere, rare enough for the Oklahoma Historical Society to build a museum right over the existing structure.
Red dirt repairs still don’t hold up as well as Marshal’s original sod bricks, but at least it’s still possible to see them. The kind of place people of that time thought was luxurious, now housing history, an old ‘shelter in place’ to remind us that hard times are relative.
‘Is This a Great State or What?’ is sponsored by WEOKIE.
