She Bought a "Ruined" Stone Shack for $5 — Unaware It will Save the Entire Town скачать в хорошем качестве

She Bought a "Ruined" Stone Shack for $5 — Unaware It will Save the Entire Town

In August 1886, Clara Vogel walked into a Kansas land office with five dollars and bought a burned-out stone ruin—four walls, no roof, nothing else. The clerk told her it wasn't fit for habitation. Heinrich Brauer, who'd survived eleven Kansas winters, told her plainly: "You'll freeze in that pile of rocks, and those children will freeze with you." She had no money for lumber. So she dragged charred timbers from the collapsed barn, cut sod from the prairie, and built a roof out of earth. The two-foot limestone walls absorbed heat during the day and radiated it back at night. On January 6, 1887, the temperature dropped forty-six degrees in twelve hours. The blizzard lasted nine days. Brauer's soddy collapsed. A neighbor's house burned down. Eight people crowded into Clara's stone shelter—and every single one walked out alive. Nineteen others in town didn't.