294 The Pioneer Dugout House

THE PIONEER DUGOUT HOUSE Ernst F. Tonsing, Ph.D. Thousand Oaks, California August 8,2004 Several times I asked my grandmother to tell me about the dugout in which her parents, Lars Johan and Carolina Christina Anderson, had first lived after their long journey from Kristdala, Smaland, Sweden, to Kansas. When I wanted to learn where it was, she would answer, "down by the bend of the road," and continue at her work, ignoring my questions. Once, she said that she would show me where it had been, but she never did, and I have always regretted that I had not been more insistent. Years later, I asked her cousin, Edith Larson, but the shadows of her last illness had obscured her memory, and I got no answer. I was resigned never to know, never to retrace the footsteps of my great grandparents, and never to see their first home in America. «

I knew what dugouts were like. I had seen pictures in books, such as the one at Osborne, Kansas, in my mother's old school text, Prentis' History of Kansas} It had roughly shaped stones piled up for the end-walls, a door, and an eight-pane window within a white frame. The sod roof started on the ground and rose on both sides to a peak. But, that one was probably far more elegant than the one my great-grandparents first erected. Theirs, no doubt, was no more than eight by twelve feet in size, dug mostly below the ground. A few rows of sod "bricks" elevated the walls a bit from the surrounding land. I recall being told that there was a step up before descending into the interior, to keep rainwater from flowing in. The roof, too, was of sod laid over rows of closely placed poles, or, perhaps of wood planks sawed by hand from some cottonwood tree. It was thick enough that it would not leak too much during heavy Kansas rains. I heard that mice would excavate tunnels through it, and, occasionally, snakes would crawl through the holes to drop suddenly upon the startled inhabitants below. The furnishings would have been primitive, perhaps a board laid across a stump for a table, niches carved in the walls for shelves, straw stuffed into bags placed on the dirt floor for beds, a few wood dishes, some tableware and tin cups, a copper teakettle, an iron stewpot and frying pan, a kerosene lamp, and a Swedish Bible. Cooking was usually done outside during the summer to keep the heat away from the house, but probably, by winter, an iron stove was installed, with a stove pipe stretching up and out the gable at the end of the house. But, most of this was my imagination. Memories of the original dugout had disappeared with the passing of time and those who had lived in it. It was a chance comment during a recent visit to central Kansas that brought a surprise. I mentioned my despair of finding the site of the dugout to my mother's cousin, lone Toll of Lindsborg, and I was startled when she said: "I know where it was." She promised to take me there. Within the hour we were driving west on the Falun Road south of Salina. About six or seven hundred feet before the road turns south to enter the 1

Nobel L. Prentis, History of Kansas (Kansas City, Missouri: Noble L. Prentis, 1899; Revised Edition, Topeka, Kansas: Caroline E. Prentis, 1904), p. 126.

little town, we stopped in a driveway leading to a house. "There it was," she said, pointing south across the road and through the hedgerow of trees. "It was where those rocks stand." In the middle of a stubble field were the remnants of some walls. I was astonished. I knew that place. Back in the early 1950's my cousin and I had tromped out over that field to look into the wreck of a large, two-story, limestone house, and the tumbled-down, one-story, frame structure attached to it on the west. We walked around the stone building to the north and saw a couple of windows and a door. The roof had caved in, so we could not enter it. Underneath, to the right, we found a trapdoor leading down into a basement. Although it had not rained for a while, the cellar was damp, and the mud steps slippery. While my cousin stood outside, I went in. I nearly fell several times, but my youthful enthusiasm at exploring unknown spaces overcame my caution. It was dark, not very large, and there were strange, thin mushrooms sticking up from the fine silt coating the steps and floor. After a "lookaround," I crawled up the slimy steps and out, stamping off the mud clinging to my shoes. So, that had been the dugout! Now I could figure out the sequence of my great grandparents' dwellings.2 Arriving in 1869, even before breaking the prairie to put in crops, the little family went about its first task, the construction of their first home. With a borrowed pick and shovel, they excavated a hole, using the blades of the tools to smooth the sides and to tamp down the dirt at the bottom. Nearby, squares were cut out of the sod, lifted, turned upside, dried, and stacked for the walls that rose a foot or so from the level of the ground around it, and others were made for the roof. A year or so passed. With the help of neighbors, limestone from the nearby hills was carved into blocks and a new house rose above the dugout, the former dwelling becoming the basement for the latter. For years it served as a potato cellar, and, occasionally, a storm cellar. As prosperity and children came, an extension was made to the house, this time of milled boards. Finally, the years of hard work and frugal discipline enabled the couple to build a new house in the late 1890's, and it was decided to erect it at the southwest corner of the property, nearer to town and the market. That was the house I knew, and in which I had asked so many questions. The dugout had been there all along. We had passed it many times, hardly noticing even the old structures above it. But, once, on a hot afternoon long ago, I had descended its damp, slippery steps into its darkness, encountering undisturbed cobwebs and ghostly mushrooms. It was no longer an imaginary place, but a real site, memorialized by the few stones still standing above it, and fragments of living memory. How delicate is the thread that transmits a family's history, and how quickly it is broken. Yet, a simple a question might, again, splice together its mysteries. All we have to do is keep asking. Another relative, Doris Frost, of nearby Smolan, found the homestead certificate and sent it to me. It was registered at the Land Office at Salina, Kansas, June 12, 1876, and was inscribed in Vol. 1986, Application No. 10263, and named my great-grandfather as having made "payment in full" for W 12, NW 14, of section No. 10, in township No. 16S, of range No. 4 West, containing 80 acres. It was signed twice, above and below, in bold, rounded letters: Lars Johan Anderson.