This photo was taken in 1917 and is my father, James Jeremiah O’Shea, sitting on the peak of a sod roofed building. The O’Shea family had moved out to their Padstow district homestead in the spring of 1915 and Dad was born that October. Padstow district is south of Mayerthorpe, Alberta.
If you look you can see that there is another similar building in the background and a pole corral. Homesteaders had to make do with whatever materials were available for several reasons. Cash money came from savings because they were not yet producing anything to sell, hauling building material many miles with a team and wagon was a huge undertaking as well as time consuming, and there was a time pressure since the animals had to have shelter before winter set in.
A sod roof used the materials at hand and went up relatively quickly as well. First pole rafters were cut and put into place with smaller poles running horizontally to support the sods. The sods were then cut from a level grass covered area into pieces somewhat longer than they were wide. These were laid onto the skeleton of the roof in an overlapping fashion in order to shed the rain. The construction of these roofs is actually very similar to the thatched roofs that were used in Europe and other places for centuries.
I can remember my father commenting on sod roof buildings:
“They were alright; if it rained for three days outside you were dry, but then it rained for three days inside!”
Apparently the sods would soak up water during an extended rainy period and then release it slowly as dripping on the inside. They did have a sod roof on their house until lumber could be obtained to construct a permanent one.
Leave a comment
Comments feed for this article