Sod House

Cleo Springs, about four miles south across what is now the Major County line, was founded in the months after the run. The first Cleo Eagle-Chief came out on March 1, 1894, and a post office called Cleo opened on March 21. Residents voted 65 to 6 to incorporate in 1901, and the Choctaw Northern Railroad came through in 1902. By 1909, the year the McCullys moved out of the soddy, the town had a mill and an elevator, harness makers and blacksmiths, two banks and an opera house. The 2020 census counted 284 people.

What the plaque says

Sod House Built by Marshal McCully who staked land on which house stands during Cherokee Strip Run, September, 1893. Plowed sod for and erected house August 1894. Used as McCully home until large frame house constructed 1909. Of the many thousands of sod houses once dotting plains of western America this is only one, built by an original homesteader, still standing. Site purchased and restoration begun 1964 by Oklahoma Historical Society as memorial to all pioneers of Oklahoma plains who lived in sod houses. Oklahoma Historical Society 1967

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sod House Museum — steps away
  Marshal McCully's two-room soddy of 1894 near Aline, the one sod house left in Oklahoma that a homesteader built, under a protective cover where it has always stood.
• Gloss Mountain State Park — 11 mi
  Red buttes of the Blaine Escarpment beside US-412, capped with gypsum whose selenite flashes in the sun, with a trail up Cathedral Mountain and a park kept by its neighbours.
• Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge — 19 mi
  About twelve thousand acres of salt flat near Jet where visitors dig hourglass selenite crystals in season, and where the Cherokee Outlet treaty kept the salt open to every tribe.
• Little Sahara State Park — 26 mi
  More than 1,600 acres of bare, moving dunes south of Waynoka, blown from the Cimarron's Ice Age terraces, begun as a park with two circus camels in 1958.

More markers nearby

• Lacey — 31 mi