Did The First Settlers To Kansas Live Underground?
Take a tour of the arched stone caves and see what you think they were meant for. Tom Parish a Emporia State University photography professor has found over 300 of them, all in a northern region of Kansas. He has travelled all over the area and spoken to many people but hasn’t ever gotten a definite answer as to what their original purpose was. He has had folks tell him they were used as root cellars and storm shelters and even a cool place to go and have a drink, yet they are some of them very big to have been for any one of those purposes. He finally found this picture with a family sitting outside of one and this leads to his belief that they were the first homes the settlers built to live in while a house was built.
It seems that on the prairie there were no trees so they couldn’t just build a cabin, These underground structures are pretty amazing in that they were built without any framing due to the lack of wood. If seems the people built a dome of dirt. Then laid the stones over it and finally covered the stones with sod. Once this was done, they then dug out the mound of dirt. This would be why they may have been called dug outs. On further investigation they found that around the bottom of cave there was gravel laid to help drainage and keep the floor dry.
This is the inside of one.
