|
|
|
Living Underground
Imagine This: You have moved somewhere far away from any cities or roads.
You don't have any bricks or lumber for a house, and winter is coming. What would you do?
You might decide to go underground - like people have done for centuries. You could dig a square hole in the ground,
maybe four feet deep, then build a slanted roof over it using poles, brush, and dirt. This pithouse would keep you cool
in the summer and pretty warm in the winter, if you have a fire going. (Unfortuntely, this house might leak during
rainstorms. It will probably also be smoky, and it will be dark inside.)
The oldest known pithouses, found in Europe, are 25,000 years old! Only 100 years ago, some people in Utah were living
in similiar houses called dugouts. And even today, a few people live in underground houses. |
| A FREMONT PITHOUSE |
People in Utah were building pithouses at least 5,000 years ago. Pithouses were one or two rooms. People could live in these underground houses either year-round or seasonally. If you cut a pithouse in half, it would look something like this: |
A SETTLERS'
DUGOUT |
150 Years ago, Anglo American settlers in Utah began building dugouts. Some people still lived in dugouts well into the 20th century. |
THINK ABOUT IT!!
How are pithouses and dugouts the same?
How are they different?
What are the advantages of a pithouse or dugout?
What are the disadvantages?
How are these houses like your house?
How are they different?
|
Pithouse |
Dugout |
 |
 |
A Hope House
Guess what? People built another kind of underground house in the 1930's to the 1960's. They're called Hope Houses. A Hope House is basically a basement with a roof on top of it. People who built these hoped they would have money sometime to build up the rest of the house. Utah still has a few Hope Houses around, but many of them did get that second story built, so they are no longer underground houses! |
 |
| |
Here's a Hope House that used to be in Highland, Utah.
It was torn down about 17 years ago. |
One Family's Dugout
Charles Nibley's family moved to Cache Valley in 1860. They built a dugout. Charles later said:
"We dug a square hole in the ground three feet deep and then built logs aroung that hole three logs high. We built up to the gables with logs then put a center roof log and one on each side of that, halfway down the wall. On top of these logs we laid small quaking aspen poles not larger than my wrist. On top of these we put straw and then covered that with a thick coat of dirt.
"My father built a cobblestone chimney in the opposite end from the entrance..... The chnimney never knew enough to draw the smoke up but spewed it out and filled the room. There was not a window of any kind whatever in our house. Neither was there a door. My mother hung up a quilt...which served as a door for the first winter. This was our bedroom, our parlor, our sitting room, our kitchen, everything in the room of about 12 feet by 16 feet." |
top of page
|
|
|
