Waterman Sod House

The house is all that is left of Day. When Wallace Waterman, who came from Pennsylvania, built it on his homestead in 1886, it stood at the south edge of a settlement on both sides of the county road: by 1900 four houses, two of them sod, a livery, a store with the 1890-1903 post office, a blacksmith, a Methodist church and a school. Its sod walls were two feet thick; limestone from the North Platte valley later shored up the north side. A small frame building of about 1925 is said to have been Day's cream station.

What the plaque says

Waterman Sod House The Wallace W. and Libby King Waterman sod house, located nine miles north of here on the Day Road, was built about 1886. The original dwelling had three rooms. In 1925 it was enlarged and remodeled by Virgil and Helen Burke Waterman, and the sod walls were covered with concrete. The family lived in the house until 1989, and it was do- nated to the Deuel County Historical Society in 1993. The house is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Deuel County Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Julesburg — 11 mi
  The town that moved four times: a trading post, a stage stop burned in 1865, the wickedest end-of-track town on the Union Pacific, and finally Denver Junction renamed.
• Ash Hollow State Historical Park — 16 mi
  The emigrants' spring below Windlass Hill, six miles from the Blue Water Creek camp where Harney's soldiers killed eighty-six Lakota in 1855, and where their belongings came home in 2025.
• Lake McConaughy and Kingsley Dam — 23 mi
  Nebraska's largest reservoir, 22 miles of North Platte water and white sand beaches behind a 1941 hydraulic-fill dam, built so farms far downstream could water their crops.

More markers nearby

• Sam Bass and the Big Springs Robbery — steps away
• Phelps Hotel — steps away
• Colorado's Northeast Corner — 4.3 mi
• Big Springs — 7.3 mi