When sod got status

Thousands of sod houses once rose from the prairie, but now only the onetime home of Marshal McCully, built from buffalo grass in 1894, still stands in Oklahoma. It is the main attraction of the Sod House Museum in the town of Aline.

Betty Bowman, an employee at the museum, imagines how happy McCully's pioneer family must have been to move from their temporary riverbank dugout into the sod home: "In a dugout, if you had a bunch of kids, and you closed the door, it was dark. And you didn't know if snakes were in there with you or not."

TOM HAINES