Old House 115

I've always liked saltbox houses. This one is in the vicinity of Melrose, New Mexico

Center outbuildings.

I'm not sure if that's a dugout in the foreground or a lost roof,
but I think it's a dugout.

Old House 55

 

Portales, NM

How the Great Depression Still Shapes the Way Americans Eat

The Faro Caudill [family] eating dinner in their dugout, Pie Town, New Mexico.
Russell Lee, 1940 (FSA/Library of Congress)

(The Atlantic) It’s difficult to imagine that modern Americans, at the zenith of an era of self-styled gastronomy and rampant food waste, could have much in common with their Depression-era forebears who subsisted (barely) on utilitarian liver loaves and creamed lima beans. But trendy excess notwithstanding, the legacy of the 1929 financial crisis lives on: From the way that ingredients and produce wend their paths to American kitchens year-round, to the tone taken by public intellectuals and elected officials about food consumption and diet. Continued

Old House 22 (Dugout)

 

Dugouts have been used by people worldwide since time began. This particular dugout was built by the Gentry family and now sits at the Muleshoe Heritage Center.
 Says Alice Liles, "A recent addition to the Center is the dugout home donated by the Bundrant family. The dugout came from Goodland in southern Bailey County and was reportedly lived in during the 30s by the Gentry family and later some of  the Bundrants during the 40s."
It's a fine example of a late period dugout, earlier dugouts would have been made of logs instead of cut timber. Dugouts were cheaper to build than a standard house, but just as labor intensive. Dugout living could be messy, with dirt constantly sifting in, but they could also be quite snug, offering insulation from extreme temperatures.
As ranchers prospered or failed, the dugouts were abandoned, leaving very few intact examples for the curious to examine.

Dugouts

(NYTBR) ... When a steer’s leg came crashing through its sod ceiling, Wilder wrote that Ma and Laura “laughed because it was funny to live in a house where a steer could step through the roof. It was like being rabbits.”
The Caseys’ dugout was less jolly: “scorpions, lizards, snakes, gophers, centi­pedes and moles wormed their way out of our walls and ceilings.” In rainstorms, Walls writes, “the dugout turned to mud. Sometimes clumps of that mud dropped from the ceiling and you had to put it back in place.” Once, during an Easter dinner, a rattlesnake dropped onto the table, and Lily’s father took a break from carving the ham to chop off its head.
Wilder’s stories have acquired such mythic power (in “The Glass Castle,” Walls lists them among her favorite childhood books) that it can be easy to forget how many American families shared similar histories, each with their own touchstones of calamity, endurance and hard-won reward. Continued

Photos: 1. Oklahoma dugout c1909 (Library of Congress). 2. The Faro Caudill [family] eating dinner in their dugout, Pie Town, New Mexico 1940 (Russell Lee/Library of Congress)