Historical Marker · No. 385
Typical Sod House Homesteader
Jackson County · South Dakota
The Browns filed on Lakota land, part of the half of the Great Sioux Reservation that the act of March 2, 1889 opened to settlers north of the White River. Their 1909 house was half dugout and half sod, its sod roof laid on cottonwood posts from a nearby creek. They had to plow only five of their 160 acres, and after eighteen months on the claim paid $80 for the patent. In 1913 Ed Brown moved an abandoned claim shack against the north end. He died here in 1920. Alice left for California in 1929, Charles in 1936.
What the plaque says
Typical Sod House Homesteader Edgar I. Brown, born in 1854, came here with wife, Alice, and son, Charles, to homestead in the BADLANDS when he was 55. Their first and only home was a side hill, sod wall, dirt roofed house. About it they built up a humble homestead. INTACT today, it is a classic example of the frugal but satis- factory life of the men who built the West. It should interest every American.
Where it stands
43.82133, -101.90007 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Minuteman Missile National Historic Site — 4.9 miA launch control center and a silo saved from demolition, the last intact pieces of 150 nuclear missiles that waited under the wheat along I-90 for twenty-eight years.
- Badlands National Park — 5.4 miThe Badlands Wall from the Loop Road, a fossil lab with paleontologists working behind glass, and ferrets brought back from the edge of extinction.
- Wall Drug — 21 miA Depression-era drugstore on the edge of the Badlands that survived by painting free ice water on signs along the highway, and never stopped.