As with so many people growing up in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, Dorothy and her family live in a very small farmhouse. Their house is small primarily because the lumber needed to build it had to be carried by train many miles.

As a consequence, Dorothy, Uncle Henry, and Aunt Em live in what is nothing more than a single room with four walls and a roof. The room is sparsely furnished, contains nothing but an old rusty stove, a cupboard for dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and two beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em have a large bed in one corner of the farmhouse/room, and Dorothy has a small bed in another corner.

As there is just one room in the farmhouse, there's no proper cellar or garret. However, Dorothy and her family do have a little hole dug into the ground, a cyclone cellar where they can hide from the devastating cyclones that frequently hit this part of the world. It is reached by way of a trap door in the middle of the floor, from where a ladder leads down to the dark little hole.

This small hole is supposed to protect the family from cyclones, but as we will see in due course, it doesn't prevent Dorothy from being sucked up into the air by a devastating tornado that will take her to the magical land of Oz.