4 minute read
Cultural Connections: Remembering the Sandwich House
They are nearly all but gone, yet there still linger many fond memories of the sandwich house. But how did this little house come to be and what does it mean to us?
Cultural Resources Director Kelly Washington shared a bit about the origins of the sandwich house.
“It was really an innovation of our people,” Kelly said. “They are unique and something you don’t really see anywhere else.”
For a long time, the River People lived in round houses called ki: in O’odham or va in Piipaash. They were made of branches and other light natural material that could be bent into a dome shape. The roofs were thatched and covered with mud and dirt to make them rainproof.
These houses were sturdy, but when a family or community member died, it was tradition to burn the house and all the deceased’s personal belongings. The remaining family then chose a new plot of land and built a new house.
As more non-Native settlers, especially the Spanish with their adobe houses, came to the community, they wondered at this practice and thought that sturdier, more permanent homes would be better.
To encourage community members to start building adobe houses, wellmeaning groups offered a variety of incentives to families who built them.
Around that time in the 1930s, the canals in the community were being redone with concrete. The redwood planking that had lined the canals became available to the community.
“That’s where the innovation came in. The men of our communities took these materials and developed their own version of the adobe house,” said Kelly.
“The planks were nailed horizontally to vertical beams and mud was then packed, or sandwiched, between the planks to form the walls.”
This was men’s work. When a house needed to be built, male family members and other men from the community would come and make the mud pits on site. Female relatives and women from the community would come too and cook all day to provide meals for the men as they worked.
Often, the houses could be completed in a couple of days.
Darayne Achin holds a photo of herself with her grandma’s sandwich house in the background and remembers such a time.
When I was about 5, we were all picking cotton. My grandma told me to take my brother and start dinner.
I put in wood chips and some newspaper and some bigger logs—I knew how not to smother the fire—but I didn’t think it was catching fast enough, so got some kerosene and I dumped it in and all over the place. The house caught fire.
We thought we were going to get in trouble so we ran and hid. They found us later and were so grateful that we were OK, we were not punished, but the house was gone.
What I remember most though is that the next day all the men and women in our family came, the men with tools and women with food and things for the family. The men worked all day and had the frame done and mud made. The women cooked. Others from the community stopped by to help and within a day or so, we had a house.
Darayne and her brother lived with her grandma from age 2 to 6. She remembers that it was one room with a big wooden pole in the middle, a woodburning stove in the corner opposite the door and an icebox next to the door. There was a double bed for her grandma and her husband and little beds for her and her brother. Outside was a shed with no windows that stayed really cool and dark where her grandma would store canned goods and other foods.
As time went on, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Housing and Urban Development encouraged block and other homes with more modern materials.
“Eventually, the sandwich homes would not pass code and were abandoned. By the 1970s, they began to disappear,” said Kelly. He considers how we have moved from homes by family and community, where everyone was together to houses built by others with everyone in their separate rooms and he wonders what we have lost.
“Back then, I never thought of [my grandparents’ house] as traditional. It was just a house,” said Kelly. “I miss the smells of the earth and natural materials. They immediately transform me back to that time in that house.
I doubt people have the same fond memories of today’s houses.”
Article Cover Photo Credit: Home built by Leonard Carlos and friends for daughter Florine Carlos courtesy of the Huhugam Ki: Museum.
