Prairie Homestead Historic Site - Philip, South Dakota

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The Prairie Homestead is one of the very few sod dwellings intact today. The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s cultural resources worthy of preservation.

The homesteaders’ living conditions in the early 1900s were similar to the conditions found in the Eastern United States 200 years earlier. However humble, it was their own and it was home. Many good pioneers survived this kind of living.

With thick sod walls and a dirt roof, this small bedroom stayed cool in summer and warmer in the severe winters than did the more modern frame buildings that were used here at that time. These little sod shanties and dugouts were common throughout the prairie. Most of them have disappeared, melted away by the prairie rains, caved in and returned to the earth from which they came.

Location: Turn off of Interstate 90 at Exit 131, the entrance to the Badlands National Park. Homestead is located just 2 miles south on Highway 240, the east entrance to the Badlands National Park

Hours: Open daylight hours May- Sept.

Phone: 605) 433-5400