Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1994
Abstract
The environment of the northern Plains caused settlers to make special adaptations to meet their need for shelter. Buildings were practical and often temporary. Dugouts and sod houses proliferated during the frontier period, then gave way to more permanent structures as settlement matured. By the late nineteenth century the balloon-frame building had become ubiquitous. Instead of requiring experienced carpenters fashioning large timbers with mortise-and-tenon joints as they had often done in the East, balloon framing utilized two-by-fours or similar pieces of lumber that amateur woodworkers could nail together without difficulty. Fabricating a balloon-frame structure became even easier with the accessibility of standard, sawmill-produced lumber available from independent and chain "line" lumber yards spawned by an expanding network of railroads. The Plains likewise became the heartland of the prefabricated, even portable building. These "ready-mades" or "knock-downs" solved the often urgent requirement for immediate but inexpensive structures on the empty prairies.1
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 14:2 (Spring 1994). Copyright © 1994 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.