Straw is an agricultural byproduct consisting of the dry stalks of cereal plants after the grain and chaff have been removed. It makes up about half of the yield of cereal crops such as barley, oats, rice, rye and wheat. It has a number of different uses, including fuel, livestock bedding and fodder, thatching and basket making.
Arthur is a village in, and the county seat of Arthur County, Nebraska, United States. The population was 117 at the 2010 census.
Straw-bale construction is a building method that uses bales of straw as structural elements, building insulation, or both. This construction method is commonly used in natural building or "brown" construction projects. Research has shown that straw-bale construction is a sustainable method for building, from the standpoint of both materials and energy needed for heating and cooling.
Cob, cobb or clom is a natural building material made from subsoil, water, fibrous organic material, and sometimes lime. The contents of subsoil naturally vary, and if it does not contain the right mixture it can be modified with sand or clay. Cob is fireproof, resistant to seismic activity, and uses low-cost materials, although it is very labour intensive. It can be used to create artistic and sculptural forms, and its use has been revived in recent years by the natural building and sustainability movements.
A natural building involves a range of building systems and materials that place major emphasis on sustainability. Ways of achieving sustainability through natural building focus on durability and the use of minimally processed, plentiful or renewable resources, as well as those that, while recycled or salvaged, produce healthy living environments and maintain indoor air quality. Natural building tends to rely on human labor, more than technology. As Michael G. Smith observes, it depends on "local ecology, geology and climate; on the character of the particular building site, and on the needs and personalities of the builders and users."
Homestead National Historical Park, a unit of the National Park System known as the Homestead National Monument of America prior to 2021, commemorates passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, which allowed any qualified person to claim up to 160 acres (0.65 km2) of federally owned land in exchange for five years of residence and the cultivation and improvement of the property. The Act eventually transferred 270,000,000 acres (1,100,000 km2) from public to private ownership.
The sod house or soddy was an often used alternative to the log cabin during frontier settlement of the Great Plains of Canada and the United States in the 1800s and early 1900s. Primarily used at first for animal shelters, corrals, and fences, if the prairie lacked standard building materials such as wood or stone, or the poverty of the settlers precluded purchasing standard building materials, sod from thickly-rooted prairie grass was abundant, free, and could be used for house construction. Prairie grass has a much thicker, tougher root structure than a modern lawn.
This is a list of more than 1,100 properties and districts in Nebraska that are on the National Register of Historic Places. Of these, 20 are National Historic Landmarks. There are listings in 90 of the state's 93 counties.
Moses Pierce Kinkaid was a member of the United States House of Representatives from the state of Nebraska. He was the sponsor of the 1904 Kinkaid Land Act, which allowed homesteaders to claim up to 640 acres (260 ha) of government land in western Nebraska.
The Kinkaid Act of 1904 is a U.S. statute that amended the 1862 Homestead Act so that one section of public domain land could be acquired free of charge, apart from a modest filing fee. It applied specifically to 37 counties in northwest Nebraska, in the general area of the Nebraska Sandhills. The act was introduced by Moses Kinkaid, Nebraska's 6th congressional district representative, was signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt on April 28, 1904 and went into effect on June 28 of that year.
The Cunningham Cabin is a double-pen log cabin in Grand Teton National Park in the US state of Wyoming. It was built as a homestead in Jackson Hole and represents an adaptation of an Appalachian building form to the West. The cabin was built just south of Spread Creek by John Pierce Cunningham, who arrived in Jackson Hole in 1885 and subsisted as a trapper until he established the Bar Flying U Ranch in 1888. The Cunninghams left the valley for Idaho in 1928, when land was being acquired for the future Grand Teton National Park.
This is a list of the National Register of Historic Places listings in Custer County, Nebraska. It is intended to be a complete list of the properties and districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Custer County, Nebraska, United States. The locations of National Register properties and districts for which the latitude and longitude coordinates are included below, may be seen in a map.
St. John's Evangelical Lutheran German Church and Cemetery, also known as St. John's Lutheran Church and Cemetery and as White Church, is located in the vicinity of Hayes Center in Hayes County, Nebraska. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. The listing includes a 10 acres (4.0 ha) area with the church as a contributing building and the cemetery as a contributing site.
The Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center is a museum dedicated to the life and works of author Mari Sandoz, and to the High Plains region of the western United States, in which Sandoz grew up, and which was the setting of many of her fictional and non-fictional works. The Center is located on the campus of Chadron State College in Chadron, Nebraska. It occupies the college's former library building, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Antioch is a tiny, unincorporated hamlet in Sheridan County, Nebraska, United States. Located approximately 15 miles east of Alliance on Nebraska Highway 2, the town was once nicknamed "the potash capital of Nebraska." The town took its name from Antioch, Ohio. There are now only a handful of houses, fewer than 25 residents, and a trash dump.
The Wallace W. Waterman Sod House near Big Springs, Nebraska, United States, is a sod house built in 1886. It was modified in 1925 for continued use, including a layer of concrete being applied to the exterior walls. It was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1995. The listing included two contributing buildings, the second being a small outbuilding from 1925.
The William R. Dowse House, more commonly known as the Dowse Sod House, is a sod house in Custer County in the central portion of the state of Nebraska, in the Great Plains region of the United States. It was built in 1900 and occupied until 1959. After a long period of neglect, it was restored beginning in about 1981, and opened as a museum in 1982.
The Nelson Farm is a historic farmstead in rural Merrick County, in the east central part of the state of Nebraska in the Midwestern United States. Originally settled by Swedish immigrants in 1879, it was expanded and improved over the subsequent eighty years and more, remaining in the founder's family into the fourth and fifth generations.
Solomon D. Butcher was an itinerant photographer who spent most of his life in central Nebraska, in the Great Plains region of the United States. A settler under the Homestead Act, he began in 1886 to produce a photographic record of the history of white settlement in the region. Over 3,000 of his negatives survive; more than 1,000 of these depict sod houses. Butcher wrote two books incorporating his photographs: Pioneer History of Custer County and Short Sketches of Early Days in Nebraska (1901), and Sod Houses, or the Development of the Great American Plains (1904).
Saint Leonard Catholic Church is a Roman Catholic church in the city of Madison, in the state of Nebraska in the Midwestern United States. Built in 1913, it has been described as "an outstanding example of the Romanesque Revival style of architecture."
