to you on Flickr or Pinterest. In some cases, Sears provided construction services to assemble the homes. The HMS data portal is a collection of models, simulations and synthetic observations of the Sun. small-town America even into the 1940 census). Sears would be listed as the architect, and because they often gave out mortgages, you can find out if the previous owner(s) had a Sears mortgage or not. The next housing boom came after World War II so that veterans could have affordable housing for their families and suburbs could accommodate the massive amount of white flight taking place. In areas where the land is already mostly developed and zoned, its not that simple. [7] Early mortgage loans were typically for 5 to 15 years at 6% to 7% interest. Designs may have been modified but generally should match in layout and dimensions. 172/ Hazelton, at 810 W 11th Street, La Porte, Indiana. Catalogs Online: Sears, Radford, Gordon-Van Tine, Sears Starlight (Sears Homes of Chicagoland), Sears Door Hardware: La Tosca, Shefton, Rhythmic, ONLINE CATALOGS on Archive.org: Sears, GVT, Radford +more. From 1931-1942 Sears sold about 5,000 houses altogether. Precut lumber was cut to the appropriate lengths and angles based on where the framing timber would be used in the house. : Ohio is the state with the largest number, Pennsylvania is the third- highest-ranking state, Prince George's County, MD & Montgomery County, MD. We could make the assumption that the model we have located the most was, in fact, the top seller. If your house was built between 1908-1940, theres a chance it might be an original Sears house. One of the biggest questions that researchers have been wanting to answer is: What is the Top-Selling Sears House of All Time? presentation, nows your chance! You roughed it until you found a new place and if you wanted a FOREVER home, you stayed put until it was done being built. You can see that La Porte, Indiana is mentioned as one of the "built at" locations: We found four examples of what we believe to be the model No. Whitehouse. Also, considering that the article was published in April of 1912, all of these models would have been marketed only with their number, as no word names were given to the models until 1916. I didn't have very many leads for Kevin Riordan, for the NJ suburbs but, for the PA side of the Philadelphia suburbs that's a different matter, indeed! Referred to as a gable-front-and-wing, it was a national folk style that owed much of its heritage to the earlier Greek Revival style. Rosemary Thornton I think teardowns are the reason that Argyles are not positioned higher in our national database of Sears homes (the Argyle comes in at number 20). These pre-1916 houses are generally considered "catalog houses", not "kit houses". In their own way, houses with Craftsman-style design elements often managed their own form of ebullient excess such as Modern Home No. Click here. The builder was W.L. There were about 132 million people by the time Sears stopped selling Sears Modern Homes kits in 1940. . 1232 click. houses that share a name also share either a number, a floor plan or had National Database: Sears Homes in the U.S. SHORT VIDEO: What It's Like to Live in a Sears Catalog Home, SHORT VIDEO: NBC Nightly News visits Andrew & Wendy Mutch. Sarah is especially interested in searching the kit homes of Western New York State, and has found us some beautiful Sears houses, but she is especially revered by all of us for her extensive knowledge of kits from the Ray H. Bennett kit homes company, which was based out of North Tonawanda. that was $886 in 1940 dollars, about $16,000 today. 159, except for a closed pediment up in the front and side gable. He published the design as #466 in his 1912 "Craftsman Bungalows" catalog. Click on any of the linked house listings to view a picture . So, I've added an asterisk next to the addresses of these possible No. Sears is estimated to have sold about 70,000 of their home building kits from 1908-1940 and it's currently estimated that about 70% of the original Sears homes built from kits are still standing today. We have three on our list in Glenside -- one on Cedar, one on Tyson, and one on Edge Hill Rd. A Newport Beach home remains dangerously close to tumbling down a cliffside after the ground underneath gave way on Friday morning. I just loved the look of it, she said. As sales grew, Sears expanded its production, shipping, and sales offices to locations across the U.S. To provide the materials needed for the Modern Homes division, Sears operated a lumber mill in Cairo, Illinois. Washington D.C. and its nearby suburbs have an unusually rich cache of kit houses stashed away in some of the leafy, well-tended neighborhoods where 1920s houses still shine. Cities with large numbers of documented Sears Modern Homes include: The Carlinville, Illinois, concentration consists of houses bought in bulk by the Standard Oil Company in 1918 to house its mineworkers at a total cost of about US $1 million. Looking at the sorry state of Americas rail infrastructure today, this also makes me weep although today theyd just be delivered via truck. A number of those homes are featured on the organizations website. 1232 / No. And it led me to dig a little deeper into the history of my community.. [5] The method was originally named in the sense that the structure was light and could be lifted away like a balloon. 264B155. 181, Sears No. Dover, Chateau, and Lexington models are particularly plentiful there! Weve got so much fucking housing just sitting there that NO ONE should be condemned to homelessness. Sears also offered mortgages to home buyers and was pretty liberal with their lending terms, which made them an attractive option for widows, the self-employed, and people in marginalized groups who otherwise had trouble qualifying for traditional bank loansa problem that still persists today. Before 1916, the home builder had to cut their Sears-supplied lumber to appropriate lengths. It mightve been easier to get a job or start a business off the bat compared to the hoops and bureaucracy we have for both these days, but there was no U-Haul or Pods to make. Many of these post 1940 homes were based on models from the 1940 and earlier Sears catalogs but not all were, leading to debate over whether these homes qualify as "Sears Modern Homes". In the early years, the models were identified with numbers. Primarily shipped via railroad boxcars, these kits included most of the materials needed to build a house. Sears's use of "balloon style" framing systems did not require a team of skilled carpenters, as did previous methods. In 1906, Frank W. Kushel, a Sears manager, was given responsibility for the catalog company's unwieldy, unprofitable building-materials department. PDF See the video of my interview on the St. Louis Business Journal's website. All these years later it is still a fortress.. 181 (264P181) in the 1914 Sears Modern Homes catalog, This image is from the 1913 Sears Modern Homes catalog re-print, available, 374 Hawthorne Street, La Porte, Indiana Sears Modern Home No. Melissa Steel of Patterson Heights in Beaver County said the story about the Sears house in McCandless sparked fond memories of the family next door who lived in one for many years. In the companys own words, Sears didnt really innovate home building. I think the reason the Sears house is so interesting is that most people associate them with the Wish Book catalog that came in the mail at Christmas. [6] Plumbing, electrical fixtures, and heating systems were options that could be ordered at additional cost; they were many families' first steps to modern HVAC systems, kitchens, and bathrooms. Tony LaRussa is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Basic cross-gabled two-story farmhouses are to be found almost everywhere in towns and cities as well as many rural areas throughout the United States. 1. You usually just left with the clothes on your back and a few trunks, and that was it. We loosely refer to ourselves by the name. 159 has two full stories on that non-porch side of the house. One key set of homes that we are fortunate to have on our list, comes from the research of noted Architectural Historian, Rebecca L. Hunter. Photo from Realtor site. How Many Sears Houses Are Still Out There? 1916 Sears Roebuck Modern Homes. I considered putting a full chart here, but, honestly, we have found hundreds through searching the suburban PA counties outside of Philadelphia. And Sears Modern Homes werent a monolith. Chabot said while Sears wasnt the first or only company to sell mail-order homes, they were unique among the competition. Thanks to Ancestry.com, we are often able to get a street name from a census record, but we run into problems there, when we find a town that has no street names (yes! Our national database of Sears houses in the U.S. has over 13,600 homes on it, and, after Ohio and Illinois, Pennsylvania is #3 in U.S. states with, at today's count, 1,963 Sears homes found. [1] Sears Modern Homes were purchased primarily by customers in East Coast and Midwest states, but have been located as far south as Florida, as far west as California, and as far north as Alaska and Canada. Park, MD. Thousands of developments in cities, suburbs, and exurbs have sprung up since with a seemingly endless amount of homes that were built between World War II and today. Modest half-timbering in the gables, exposed rafters, knee braces, and gable-end ridge finials combine to create an optimistic facade. Call me a cynic, but I often wonder why kit houses were not stolen. There are two examples of this model, in La Porte. Betcone spoke of how housing styles were drastically changing and how many customers wanted more efficient, streamlined designs. Lara was joined by researcher Cindy Catanzaro, who researches especially in Ohio, and writes the blog. Depending on where you live, the thought of just building a small or medium sized house can sound totally bizarre or perhaps totally doable if youve got miles and miles of wide open space to work with. This label was discovered in a Sears Silverdale model home built in 1911 in Northhampton, Mass., by Judith Chabots grandparents. Those are ridiculously difficult to pin down. 115 cuts off abruptly, right in the middle of the front facade, even with the left side of the upper window, and it then has a straight slope porch roof jutting out. Browse the list below to see if there are Modern Homes in your 199 models here in La Porte, are somewhat tweaked in their design, but we still do think that they are examples of that model. Sears Modern Homes are something we totally need to bring back from the past for this. Search crews have rescued Californians stranded for days in multiple feet of snow after back-to-back storms plastered the state's mountain communities and trapped many in their homes. Sears could keep manufacturing costs down compared to standard builders and competing catalogs because they had their own manufacturing facilities by then and were able to mass-produce wood, asphalt, insulation material, hardware, and everything else needed to produce a home that wasnt a Habitat for Humanity hut. During the Modern Homes program, large quantities of asphalt shingles became available. Ha! If those were the top sellers, no model could catch the Argyle at that rate. In many cases, we may be able to tell you of homes in your town, that have actually been authenticated as Sears homes, and, in some cases, we may be able to tell you that the house in question is a kit house from another company (consider, , All photos in these blog posts are the property of the author of this blog- link to this blog. Many of the homes original features remain intact. There are examples of modern homes built based on the design of Sears Modern Home. Damn, it was like Stardew Valley! By the time of the 1914 catalog, the model had been tweaked, to add the peak gable, closed pediment pop-up dormer over the upper bay windows. Chabot focuses her research on scouring mortgages and deed records, old newspaper articles and other sources to identify kit homes sold by Sears. However, based on what the experts said in that Atlas Obscura piece, youre most likely to find Sears homes in places where railroad stations once stood (or are lucky to still have) and where Sears factories had a major role on the local economy, like Cincinnati. 162 Sears houses still standing, including those in the city of Alexandria. Not all Sears houses became private residences. Kushel is credited with suggesting to Richard Sears that the company assemble kits of all the parts needed and sell entire houses through mail order. The houses made it as far as Alaska and Canada, as the parts were delivered by railroad. But it was a different story when Sears began selling house building kits in 1908. The mortgage program was also a PR disaster, as many of the families Sears foreclosed upon refused to do further business with the company. Some of the models are easier to identify visually and their counts may be disproportionately high. I saw a recent article in The Star Ledger about Sears Homes that mentioned your blog. Sales were down, and there was excess inventory languishing in warehouses. ", "Bill of Materials for Sears Modern Home", "Two Italian Families and their Neighboring Sears Houses", "New Homes in Cranford for $4,000!Biggest development evolved in Sunny Acres", "Yes, Virginia, Sears Homes Were Built After 1940", "The Top Four Most Popular Sears Homes--Have You Seen These? I don't feel comfortable making that assumption. I think that we had only a handful of houses already on the list a few. The windows, the kitchen and the bathroom were updated over the years, but it is still very much the house it was when it was built.. Construction of the houses took nine months which were completed in 1919. These stamps are normally located on or near the ends of pieces of framing timber. While these features werent in every single Sears home, they still set the stage for home builders to realize what people wanted in their new digs because of how much their quality of life was improved. Then, we always get a chuckle when the legal description includes things like, "by a large Elm tree" or "100 feet past a stone marker". We maintain the National Database of Sears Houses in the U.S., where we add new finds, almost daily. Here is a year-by-year list of houses as they were advertised in the Sears Modern Homes catalogs. 172, later marketed as the. Andrew is our number-cruncher, and his blog, I joined the team shortly after Lara, Cindy and Andrew began, in earnest, to log the homes that they were finding. Sears Modern Homes built in the 1930s may have a small circled "SR" cast into the bathtub in the lower corner (furthest from the tub spout and near the floor) and on the underside of the kitchen or bathroom sink. And Sears Modern Homes werent a monolith. Andrew Mutch ran across that same article in the American Lumberman, and posted in our group, asking if anyone was interested in looking for some of the old models that might be around. , something that piqued my interest was the idea that you could buy literal houses from the catalog. In some cases, homeowners used plans from original Sears homes to recreate a modern version of a Sears home. The nine easy signs follow: 1) Look for stamped lumber in the basement or attic. Wonderful, Malissa! Click to visit. So, I'll just post a nice selection here. From 1908 to 1940, the Sears Modern Homes Program offered complete mail-order houses to the would-be homeowner what would come to be called "kit homes." Customers could select from dozens of different models in Sears Modern Homes Catalog, order blueprints, send in a check, and a few weeks later everything they needed would arrive in a train car, its door secured with a small red wax . Would you mind messaging me with an address, so that we can add your Sears house to our (private) national database? This Sears mail-order kit home in McCandless is owned by Normajean Moser. Compare that to about 330 million people today. You had the flexibility to swap out certain elements without causing the whole thing to collapse like one of those Instagrammable burgers thats way too tall. Fast forward to this past summer --early August of 2022. The group has identified 2,700 Sears homes in Ohio and 2,300 in Illinois. Author, researcher and lecturer Rebecca Hunter became fascinated with the phenomenon of mail order homes in 1996, and is currently engaged in the study of kit homes and agricultural buildings marketed from 1906-1982 by nine different companies. Simple theme. Another gabled ell farmhouse that we found quite a few of in La Porte, is the No. Tucker/Crossroads They had. Run by experienced researcher Cindy Catanzaro (with a little help from yours truly). But, as of this date in 2021, here are leading areas in the U.S. with high numbers of Sears houses. If any of you have ever been interested in coming to see me do a kit home And, to top it off, Gordon-Van Tine has a model almost the same. 110 (, 1524 2nd Street, La Porte, Indiana earliest version of the Sears No. Please browse through and enjoy the 1,000+ posts and 5,000+ photos! The larger Victorian-style houses that were already there and scant in number were out of reach for working class first-time home buyers. The wild pursuit began with an a | Sears Modern Homes", "Sears Houses in Arlington Virginia: A Comprehensive List", "How Sears built an entire local neighborhood", "Historic Structures Crystal Lake Historical Society", "Sears Houses in Elgin Illinois arranged according to model name", "Philadelphia Inquirer: Sears Homes in the Philly Suburbs and Sears House Hunters", "Where are the rest of the Sears houses in the U.S.? Sears Magnolia was also known as Model #2089. What was up with this particular model of home building, and are there any original Sears houses left? Images are available I now live in St. Louis, Missouri, and am sometimes asked if there are any Sears houses here. is selling shipping container homes for about $50,000 a pop and Amazon is also selling prefab tiny houses at a variety of sizes and price points. 168/Matoka, 301 Weller Avenue, La Porte, Indiana probable Sears Modern Home No. Molly Harbst of Munhall sent along photos of her beautifully preserved Sears homes a 1920 model called The Crescent after reading the article. 1916 Sears Roebuck Modern Homes. contacting them by clicking on their name. The Sears Argyle was a small house, about 1,000 square feet, and many of them have been demolished. Researching Historic Kit and Plan Book Homes, We started looking around La Porte, Indiana, in 2015. 171 examples in La Porte. We just can't say, because we can't access those records. Simple theme. So this blog has been radio silent for a while now! [38][39], One well-known replica of a Sears house is at the "Farm at Prophetstown" museum in Battle Ground, Indiana, which features a replica of a Hillrose model. Our list, in fact, began with 345 Sears houses that Mrs. Lask had found in the Cincinnati area, as part of a Masters Degree thesis project at the University of Cincinnati. Our national database of Sears houses in the U.S. has over 13,500 homes on it, and, after Ohio and Illinois, Pennsylvania is No. city or state, or to find someone who owns the same model as you. Chabot notes that Sears mail-order homes sold before 1916 did not use precut lumber that was stamped with numbers to guide construction. They produced three different product lines based on budget: the high-end Honor Bilt homes, Standard Built homes that were popular with young families, and Simplex Sectional low-budget homes that were mostly used as vacation cottages. They werent all the 3-bedroom Craftsman ranch style you see throughout Los Angeles or the compact Levittowners in Pennsylvania and Long Island to the east: the, models were probably the great-grandaddy of the modern McMansion, with the, model being its odd little cousin that sits in the potato salad at the family reunion, what with the odd arrangement of, True to the companys roots in selling to rural Midwesterners, they even had a catalog for farmhouses, barns, and other barn buildings. . Others were not but were still pre-cut kit homes built from plans and materials from Sears. I'm currently working my way through the Burlington County records, but they are limited, and set up in a way that makes the process very time consuming. You'll notice that most are in states east of the Mississippi River, with highest overall state totals in Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York. Here is the Uriel or Conway at 408 Bond Street. That's why we love seeking them out! It even halted sales of houses themselves for a short time before restarting sales. The suburbs of Philadelphia are not the only places where we find Sears houses, by the way. However, the streets that are lined with these farmhouse models (and many other houses), are actually in the Lakeview neighborhood so, we imagine that was a mistake in the article. The article explained that Sears had already sold five houses that were in the midst of construction, and these first houses were all of three different models, and at least 50 more would be built with the possibility that a total of 200 might find their way to the streets of La Porte (it doesn't look like that happened). We are a team of about 10 researchers who work together to hunt around the U.S. for Sears kit houses built during the era of the Sears Modern Homes program (1908-1942). It was built in 1917. Spatial information is available through GIS downloads or can be viewed in the BIOS Viewer. However, these stamps were not used on lumber shipped before 1916, when Sears first started offering pre-cut lumber. However, as you can see in the photos above, that showed the sides of the house, the Rossville/No. Carrying on with Same Name, Different House topic we find that some of the The group has identified nearly 540 of the estimated 1,000 Sears mail-order homes that are believed to have been constructed in the region. Sears discontinued its Modern Homes catalog after 1940, though sales through local sales offices continued into 1942. 306 Highland, Madison, WI. If your house was built between 1908-1940, theres a chance it might be an original Sears house. 171's porch roof (when it is a partial porch) connects to the house far to the right side of that upper window and then has a wedge-shape side part to that roof, so that both models end the porch just to the edge of the front door, but with a very different treatment to the shape of the porch roof there. Sears is estimated to have sold about 70,000 of their home building kits from 1908-1940 and its currently estimated that. For this week's listing of the week, we decided to find seven charming Sears Catalog homes you can actually buy today. This site is a tribute to the original Sears Houses in Cincinnati Moreover, it was just more feasible to plunk down a house somewhere because there just werent as many homes on account of a smaller population. , such as stamped lumber in the basement or attic, shipping labels on the baseboards and other millwork, or even looking up your deed and records pertaining to the actual home purchase. 159, but it's likely especially because we have found interior views of a couple, and we think we see Sears staircase balusters and newel. Having just covered the Fallen Titan that is Sears department stores, something that piqued my interest was the idea that you could buy literal houses from the catalog. Where Are The Rest Of The Sears Houses In The U.S.? Not all Sears houses were mortgaged through Sears, but many were, so it's a great help for us to be able to access those records. According to Betcone, the two models that were the top sellers for Sears in 1930 totaled just over 100 houses a year. To see a variety of models similar to the Mitchell, that were offered during the kit-house era, see this article. We love her for giving us this to quote over and over again and for the many Sears houses that she has added to our list. House was moved to Carbondale, CO in about 1972, Still trying to find more info.. But what if you want something bigger than a tiny house, but not as gargantuan as the average American single family home? A kick-off celebration was held March 3, 2023, for the newly renamed BMO Stadium. I thought it was very interesting when I learned that you could also buy a house from their catalogs.. 126 and a Sears No. There was one snippet in the press release that only a couple newspapers reprinted: "Following twelve years of usefulness, one old design was removed from the home catalogue in 1928, as antiquated after having been constructed more than 1700 times, which probably constitutes the world's record for any construction duplication from a single house plan, he [Betcone] says.". Your comment will appear after it has been previewed and approved by the blog author. Knowing the limitations of a newspaper article, I know that he will only be able to show one or two house photos, so I thought that I would highlight a few that we have found, through our research. to you on Flickr or Pinterest. See that curled element at the hinge edge? The iron strapping itself can be strait or curved, but the curlicue is always there, if it's iron strapping from Sears. Sales slowly recovered as the United States emerged from the Great Depression until 1940. By Posted on Mar 10, 2021. national database of sears homes.
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