Holter Visits the Homestead National Monument of America, Thinks Your Should Too

Holter Graham is the co-host of Wa$ted! and writes about his experiences on the show and going green in the world at large.

Elle McGee and her husband, the family from the Elle's Challenge Episode, serve their country in different ways. When we went to visit with her and her son, her husband had just deployed to Iraq. It got me thinking about what people choose to defend, what makes this place worth defending.

And that reminded me of the trip my wife and I took to the Homestead National Monument of America. We had just finished visiting the Willa Cather home site in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and found this little gem on the map on our way back east. It was three miles off the route we were driving, and when you put in a thousand miles in a weekend in a greened-up pickup that gets 12% better mileage than it did when we bought it 13 years ago, what's three miles?

Boy, were we glad we stopped. As you crest a rise in the rolling sandhills of eastern Nebraska, the Heritage Center soars up out of the rolling prairie. The building is designed to look like a huge plow, the greatest tool of the Homesteaders as they tried to carve lives out of the frontier. This image of a huge plow on the prairie was immortalized in Willa Cather's "My Antonia," which may be the best book ever for getting an idea of what Homesteaders dealt with.

In keeping with the green mindset, there are solar panels helping create juice, and the building itself is designed and built to use as little energy as possible, as well as being built from local materials, reducing the carbon footprint immensely.

And you learn that the Homesteaders were green. Maybe not for our reasons (they had not warmed the globe and destroyed their environment anywhere near as much as we have since then) and maybe not with our technology. But they were green.

Homesteaders were having a bare-knuckle fight with capricious Nature, and they learned very fast that the best way to claim a little corner of the wild frontier was to cooperate with Nature as much as was possible.

Homesteaders tended to use geothermal heating and cooling: they built their early dwellings into the sides of the hills to insulate against the heat and cold of the seasons, as well as the almost-permanent howling wind that makes the Midwest one of the best US sources of wind energy now.

They also often built 'cooler holes' in the backs of these homes: little caves dug deep into the hillside where they would store foodstuffs that were better kept cool and dry. No fridge? try a hillside! They built root cellars; separate underground rooms where they would keep their stores—potatoes, carrots, etc.—as well as the canned and jarred food they grew and preserved themselves: levels of organic gardening, composting, and "Localism" a hundred years before those concepts existed in the new environmental movement.

Homesteaders used wind power. Most often a windmill was a very simple affair, and the mechanical energy it created was tied directly to a water pump mechanism to draw water from underground in the water table and provide clean consistent water for livestock and family alike.

The Heritage Center covers everything, not making the mistake of so many information sources and leaving out the unpleasant: there is care given to the Native American peoples who were displaced and often destroyed by the white wave into their lands. Homesteading was a triumph for one population, and the beginning of the decimation of another—a culture more in tune with nature than those who have come since.

The Heritage Center also addresses the uplifting truth that many Homesteaders were freed or escaped slaves, or black Americans going west to escape the racist policies of the east. The wide open prairie represented safety and ownership for many who had never known it before, immigrant and black alike. Ellis Island was, in part, created to document the huge wave of immigrants coming to American to take advantage of the Homestead Act of 1862.

Now, it wasn't all windmills and smiles. The Homesteaders were also the fine point of a blade of land abuse that developed over the following century, bringing us the Great Dust Bowl and the beginning of the compaction/water wastage issues that threaten the United Sates today.

But if you want to have a fantastic experience in one of this country's newest National Parks, a well-run, well-staffed, and well-worth-it example of the best kind of education we can get from our own history, then the Homestead National Monument of America should be on your next trip itinerary.

Don't miss the Elle's Challenge Episode of Wa$ted Holter writes about.

Read more about living off the grid:
Men vs. Wild with Will Farrell (Video)
Can't Afford to Live Off-Grid? Reduce Your Energy Consumption: 6 Ways
Make Your Own Solar Box Cooker
Live in a Green, Sustainable...Hobbit Hole?
How to Go Green: Gardening
How to Go Green: Home Renovation