Frontier Sod Roof

Mackinaw city on the south shore of the mackinac straits the year is 1775.

Frontier sod roof. When railroads reached the frontier as they did in montana in 1880 materials such as lumber tar paper and shingles were immediately available to newly arrived homesteaders. Southwest wisconsin a 170 mile loop winds past lead mines a famous grotto and a brewery town. The first good rain started this sod to growing and soon the dugout roof was covered with waving grass. In addition the sod in much of nebraska has a lot of sand in it which makes the sod permeable.

The floor of the dugout home was of dirt or rough wooden planks. Over this was carefully fitted a double layer of the sod building blocks. Lumber roofs had rafters with wood sheathing nailed over the rafters. Also a steeper roof required longer timbers which were hard to come by.

Allowing for snow loads and your family gathering for summer breakfast on top of the house figure that the beams and rafters under a sod roof will have to carry 100 pounds per square foot. Rain helped the sod to grow and soon the dugout roof was covered with waving grass. Roof g curb. Tar paper in between the sheathing and the sod helped cut down the number of leaks.

So builders tended to keep sod roofs shallow. A better roof could be made with sawed lumber but that increased the cost of the soddy. Life on the grand portage once a corner of northeast minnesota was the center of the fur trade universe. The sod house.

4 162 lbs 5 16 times 21 460 lbs hrs g headlights p. Still fighting the civil war at historic sites battle. Other stories in frontier history destination. The grass almost concealed the roof but did not affect its insulating or protective properties.

Some frontier families found that their cows grazed on their roof and occasionally had them fall through. The sod house or soddy was an often used alternative to the log cabin during frontier settlement of the great plains of canada and the united states primarily used at first for animal shelters corrals and fences if the prairie lacked standard building materials such as wood or stone or the poverty of the settlers precluded purchasing standard building materials sod from thickly rooted. Many of the roofs were covered with sod cut somewhat thinner than that used in the side walls.