Post #800114

If go to Sacramento and look at some of the houses there built 100 years ago, you can see they all have these basements that are half in, half out of the ground. In the summer it can get up to 100 and stay there for weeks at a time, so during the hottest parts of the day people would go down and stay in the basement. In the spring, the nearby river would often flood (before they built dams and levies), so raising the homes that half story kept the majority of the house out of the water. Pumping them out with hand pumps later on must have been a bitch.