Sod House Museum

Marshal McCully made the run into the Cherokee Outlet at noon on September 16, 1893, and spent his first year here in a one-room dugout cut into the bank of a ravine. In August 1894 he built a house of the prairie itself. He hitched his team to a 14-inch sod plow, turned the buffalo grass into long rows, chopped the rows into 18-inch blocks with a flat shovel, and laid them like bricks. For rafters he split poles from the few trees nearby and laid twelve inches of sod across them for the roof. Unlike most builders of soddies, he plastered the inside walls with alkali clay. The museum reckons the two rooms took half an acre of sod, ninety-six tons of it.

McCully received his homestead certificate on April 15, 1902, and his patent on December 31, 1903. The family lived in the soddy until 1909, when they built a two-story frame house, and used it for storage until 1963. On December 31, 1963, sixty years to the day after the patent, the Oklahoma Historical Society acquired it, and it was listed in the National Register in 1970.

Thousands of sod houses once stood on the plains, and this is the only one in Oklahoma left that a homesteader built. It is still on its original ground, inside a building that protects it. Visitors walk through the furnished rooms and the root cellar, and a second building holds horse-drawn equipment, including a steel-beam plow of the kind that cut the sod.