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Philip, South Dakota (605) 433-5400 Call Anytime - 24 hours/day
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| Mr. and Mrs. Ed Brown, their son, Charles, and granddaughter. The other child is a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Brown. The picture was taken in 1913. |
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Philip, South Dakota (605) 433-5400 Call Anytime - 24 hours/day
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| Mr. and Mrs. Ed Brown, their son, Charles, and granddaughter. The other child is a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Brown. The picture was taken in 1913. |
The Prairie Homestead is the original home of Mr. and Mrs. Ed Brown who homesteaded this 160 acres in 1909. It was later occupied by Mr. George Carr until 1949. All the buildings except the cave are the same as they were except for the maintenance and minor restoration. The cave had collapsed so was dug out and rebuilt in the spring of 1966. The original homestead is preserved as though a homestead family was living there today. A small portion of the furnishings is original, the rest typical of the Sodbusters in this area.
Mr. Brown used cottonwood logs (a native tree) for his homestead home. The beams are the original ones he used. The log front is also original. He plowed buffalo grass sod for the upper walls of his home. The sod area around the window was replaced from the same field that Mr. Brown first built his sod home. The remainder of the sod is original. His home was warm in winter and cool in summer. The living room was a deserted claim shack moved in and added on the dugout a few years later.
The cave and chicken house were dug into the bank as was his house. The cave served as a refrigerator in the summer and a. place that food and milk would not freeze in the winter. Mr. Brown or probably any homesteader did not have all the machinery that will be seen at the barn. Usually the homesteader had a plow and maybe one or two other pieces of machinery. Whatever he was lacking, he had to borrow from a neighbor. The prairie dogs, a rodent related to the ground squirrel, who are digging near the paths, were early inhabitants of this area. When the homesteaders came to this area the prairie dog towns spread over thousands of acres.
Visual memories of homestead days are fast becoming extinct. These pioneers played a very important part in settling the Great Plains. This area of South Dakota was one of the last places to be homesteaded because western South Dakota was set aside as Indian reservation. First the Black Hills were taken, then in 1890 an Indian treaty was signed for this center section. This area between the White and the Cheyenne Rivers was surveyed in 1892 and settled between 1900 and 1913. By 1900 the Homestead Act had been amended several times. One change was that five acres was all that was required to be plowed into crops. Another was that if a homesteader desired, after living on the claim a period of eighteen months, he could pay 50¢ per acre, a total of $80.00 and receive a patent on the land. This Mr. Brown did.
The Prairie Homestead is typical of the homes they built or rather dug into the ground as one grandmother said, "We dug in like coyotes." These homestead buildings are one of a few that have survived almost as they were in 1909. Practically every 160 acres near here has a depression on the side of a hill or edge of a bank where a homestead family dug in for a new start in life.
The sodbuster in this area had a very difficult time surviving poverty, and many of them did not. It has now been determined that 160 acres in this area will produce grazing enough for only eight cows. Imagine what was left for living for the year when most homesteaders had at least four horses and a milk cow or two. There was seldom any grain to harvest and certainly not much to sell.
Edgar Irwin Brown was born of French, Scotch and Dutch ancestry in Iowa on October 27, 1854, and died April 2, 1920, here at Prairie Homestead. He was one of seven children. He grew to manhood in Iowa where he married Alice Alberta Story. Alice Story was born April 9, 1858, of English ancestry in Onondaga County, New York and died December 21, 1943 in Long Beach, California. She was one of a family of thirteen.
Two children, a boy and a girl, were born to Ed and Alice Brown while they lived in Iowa. From Iowa they moved to Pierce, Nebraska. There he did farming and later teaming for a big rancher. Here their children grew up.
In 1909, Mr. and Mrs. Brown and their son, Charles, moved to the Badlands of South Dakota and filed on a homestead. They came here as many homesteaders did, with a team and wagon. The original grub box from this wagon may be seen near the barn.
In a letter from Candace M. Brown McDonald, daughter of Ed and Alice, she said, "They loved the place, the country and all the people. Mother was so happy to be there, even though she worked hard. We brought her here to rest (California) but she wished to be back there. She always missed the homestead and her friends."
In 1936, Charles Brown moved to California to join his mother. George Carr rented this 160 acres from Charles Brown. He was originally from Iowa but lived in this area for many years. Mr. Carr was a bachelor. He is remembered for his many good meals he cooked for neighbors and his love for children. In 1948, Mr. Carr felt he no longer could stay here alone and moved away.
There was an unending supply of build material for sod houses. The prairie buffalo grass sprouted from densely tangled roots giving the top three inches of soil a tight consistency. The sodbuster shaved off a belt of roots and grass 12 to 18 inches wide and three inches deep. This ribbon of sod was cut into 18 inch strips. He started the building by laying each block, with the grass side down, staggering layers like brickwork. Two rows were usually arranged parallel making the finished walls about 24 inches thick. Intersecting layers were lapped together at the corners with a pole used to hold the beams. As the sod house grew spaces were left for windows.
The National Register of Historic Places records the story of a nation. Publicly owned or privately owned, it is a special part of American Heritage judged by the Secretary of Interior, through the National Park Service, to possess significance for all Americans and be worthy of a place on the National Register. The Prairie Homestead was placed on National Register of Historic Places in spring of 1974.
Prairie Homestead has the only white prairie dog town in the world. There is an occasional white prairie dog here and there, mostly in captivity and most trace back to our town. This all started in 1966 when the Oglala Sioux Tribe was going to poison out a large area of prairie dogs which contained two or three white animals.
Through cooperation of an official of the Sioux Tribe and the Superintendent of Badlands National Park, I was given whatever I could catch.
We were successful in catching one white male and got him to stay with our other five prairie dogs. He lived for several years so his genes got spread throughout our town. It took 30 years before most of the town turned white. Now most every pup born is white.
White prairie dogs proved to be popular pets and for awhile they were sold at the Homestead. In 2004, an outbreak of monkey pox brought to the US from Africa, was found at a pet store in Texas and the USDA placed a moratorium on the sale of many small animals including prairie dogs. No disease was ever found in the Homestead prairie dogs: however, at the present time prairie dogs are not allowed to be sold. It is hoped that the moratorium will be lifted in the near future.
The Browns had a farm sale in 1936 and sold most of their farm machinery. So the implements that you see close in around the Homestead are ones that belonged to the Crew family who settled one mile to the east in 1910. Keith Crew, the present owner of the Prairie Homestead, still lives and ranches on the land where he was born. The machinery is typical of the equipment the homesteader would have accumulated after several years.
The machinery on the hillside to the west was donated by grandsons of Louis Johnson who homesteaded three miles west of here in 1902. North of the barn is some equipment donated by Dale Jensen, whose father, Corliss C. and Grandfather, Nels A. Jensen, homesteaded near Owanaka, S.D. in 1911.
The painted machinery across from the Visitor Center is a collection of horse drawn implements acquired by Keith Crew. The exception is the horse drawn well drill given by Paul Jensen. His father and grandfather, early day homesteaders, drilled the first well in Wall, S.D. They used this machine to drill wells in the surrounding area for many many years.
When the first Homesteaders came to this area many of them brought iris plants from home, knowing that the hardy plant could withstand the trip west for weeks or months on end, in the hot summer as well as the cold winter. These little iris plants grew and multiplied rapidly, therefore they were shared with neighbors and used as decorative plants to place on graves.
There are still some of the original iris, often called flags, on the prairies where a homesteader once lived. The buildings may be gone but the iris lives on at these abandoned home sites. Throughout the Great Plains, from Mexico to Canada, iris can be found blooming in and around old cemeteries.
After extensive research, we have found that there are also varieties of iris that can be found in the old cemeteries, many of them have been there for at least one hundred years. Whenever we find iris that have spread away from the graves as well as outside the fences, perhaps in nearby ditches, we take samples and plant them near the north entrance to Prairie Homestead. Many of these cemeteries contain graves dating back to the Civil War and the early 1900's.
It is also thought that early Episcopal pastors may have distributed a particular variety of iris to their parishioners here in western South Dakota as the same color and variety can be found existing in many of their old cemeteries.
The iris that we have collected indicate that they have lived and multiplied without any care, through intense heat, bitter cold and lack of rainfall, and are not one of the new varieties found today. The samples are labeled on a small cross with the name of the cemetery and when possible the nearest town.
The iris around the entrance sign are a mixture of the old iris as well as some of the newest hybrids, many donated by interested family and friends.
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