I believe my parents were the 3rd owners purchasing the house in 1965 or 1966. Weve got so much fucking housing just sitting there that NO ONE should be condemned to homelessness. In the companys own words, Sears didnt really innovate home building. Here are a few: Andrew just today noticed this brick house with the Sears curlicue decorative iron strapping (only offered by Sears, and the only style of iron strapping ever offered by Sears). Not all Sears houses became private residences. 2023 Trib Total Media | All Rights Reserved. When we find a mortgage record, we're just given a buyer's name, and a legal description of a property. There is some debate about whether some homes from Sears that were built in 1941 and 1942 qualify as Sears Modern Homes. One Magnolia built in Lincoln, Nebraska, was demolished in 1985. Measuring in at a roomy 3,500 square feet, the . Would you mind messaging me with an address, so that we can add your Sears house to our (private) national database? Camden County would be a great place to search, because we know that there are Sears houses in Collingswood, Haddon Township, Haddonfield, and Haddon Heights but, how many? But, as of this date in 2021, here are leading areas in the U.S. with high numbers of Sears houses. If my house is not a kit, where did it come from? Lets find out! No built examples have been found of some of the least popular models. Many of the smaller models are regularly torn down. We've seen this in Carlinville, Illinois, and we've seen this with large orders of homes bought from Aladdin and from Gordon-Van Tine. But it was a different story when Sears began selling house building kits in 1908. 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. Home Whatever Happened to Those Mail-Order Houses From the Sears Catalog? 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. 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. Were most Sears Houses built by the owners? Sears Lewiston: A Sears Model Home in New Jersey Authenticated Sears Lewiston 261 N. Jackson St., North Plainfield, NJ 1929 This great-looking Sears Lewiston was built in 1929, and used as a model home for Sears after it was built by Anthony P. Raffaniello, and his wife, Helena. Thanks! I think that one of our researchers, Lara Solonickne. 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. Whatever Happened to Those Mail-Order Houses From the Sears Catalog? That year, the Aladdin Company of Bay City, Michigan, offered the first kit homes through mail order. Later, Sears constructed a second mill in Port Newark, New Jersey and purchased the Norwood Sash and Door Company in Norwood, Ohio. [2] No comprehensive list of their locations exists.[3]. Looks like Yoho probably bought plan #466 from H. L. Wilson, the actual designer. Sales peaked in 1929, just before the Great Depression. I have the Farnum in New Brighton PA. 1929. 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. 168 (Matoka): Here is the catalog image of the No. 2) Look for shipping labels. The Sears Argyle was a small house, about 1,000 square feet, and many of them have been demolished. Original paperwork for the house including blueprints and letters of correspondence from Sears. Prefab homes arent exactly an exotic concept nowadays. You can contact Rose through her Facebook group, "Sears Kit Homes" or email: Magnolia2047@gmail.com. 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. One of the early Sears House researchers that our group still relies on for her expertise in the D.C. housing market, is D.C. realtor Catarina Bannier (Bannier & Sandalow). True to the companys roots in selling to rural Midwesterners, they even had a catalog for farmhouses, barns, and other barn buildings. She said she also didnt know it was a mail-order house when she bought it 14 years ago. The houses made it as far as Alaska and Canada, as the parts were delivered by railroad. I now live in St. Louis, Missouri, and am sometimes asked if there are any Sears houses here. 1916 Sears Roebuck Modern Homes. Here is one of the eleven examples in La Porte: This early version of the No. Sears Modern Homes were kit homes and the framing members were stamped with a letter and a number to help facilitate construction. Simple theme. . Ohio resident Marie Vore reached out to us one day, on our Sears Modern Homes Facebook page, with a question about a possible Sears house that she had run across in a real estate listing. Mrs. Lask had been a well-respected and well-known docent at the Cincinnati Historical Society, who led interesting bus tours and lectures about Cincinnati architectural history, when she embarked on this project in the 1990s (which she did while in her 70s-- a testament to the concept of life-long learning). easier. Images are available And Sears Modern Homes werent a monolith. 181, Sears No. Simply put, life was rougher. Sears Modern Homes offered more than 370 designs in a wide range of architectural styles and sizes over the line's 34-year history. The mortgage program was also a PR disaster, as many of the families Sears foreclosed upon refused to do further business with the company. Looking at the sorry state of Americas rail infrastructure today, this also makes me weep although today theyd just be delivered via truck. Some models were offered with variations, the most common of those being expanded floor plans and additional finished living spaces. Wonderful, Malissa! Rockstar, Consistent Trees, and Baryon Mass data from the Generation 3 and Generation 6 VELA Simulations. But before all this, having to get your own home built was more common instead of getting on a waitlist for a HUD-subsidized tract home or buying one secondhand from the current occupant. In 1906, Frank W. Kushel, a Sears manager, was given responsibility for the catalog company's unwieldy, unprofitable building-materials department. 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. Sears Modern Homes were sold between 1908 and 1942. 1. As only a small percentage of these homes were documented when built, finding these houses today often requires detailed research to properly identify them. If yours is not one of those, please let us know :) We are confident about all three being Sears houses, but have not been able to authenticate any of them (with mortgage or deed records, blueprints, shipping labels, letters from Sears, or marked lumber). Simple theme. In late 1930, sales of Searshomes were starting to tank. built in New Jersey could look just like the same one ordered in Texas and built there, but it wasnt designed to look exactly like the other homes on the block. 168 / Matoka: I am really (really!) Thanks for giving me a new appreciation for the Argyle! According to a review written by Mary Ann O'Boyle of Takoma Park, Maryland, her Sears home feels "unabashedly American, the kind of house you see in movies about the good old days" and "allows me to connect with the past". They came in all sizes and price points before buying a ready-made house or building kit of your choosing became relegated to the tiny house movement if you dont have the resources to buy a plot of land and build from there. However, in La Porte, we've also found five examples* of houses that look like a great match for the No. 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). I'm not surprised that the Argyle is likely the best seller; it had a long run and was as good-looking as it was practical. So, Can We See Some Philly Suburbs Sears Houses? Government spending was dedicated to housing in an unprecedented manner as the mantra was driven home that the ideal was a nuclear family in a 3-bedroom suburban house with a car in every driveway. muhammad ali i am the greatest speech transcript . Documented Sears houses have been found across the United States and in a few locations in Canada. Im looking at this cute little Cape Cod that was $886 in 1940 dollars, about $16,000 today. 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. Local building requirements sometimes dictated that certain elements of the house construction be done professionally and varied depending on where the house was constructed. : Ohio is the state with the largest number, Pennsylvania is the third- highest-ranking state, Prince George's County, MD & Montgomery County, MD. We have not surveyed all areas of the country equally. I grew up in a Sears house located in Keyport NJ. Although it is sometimes claimed that no Sears kit homes were built after 1940, Sears continued to offer pre-cut kit homes through 1941 and into early 1942. 175 (in 1913). The most popular models appeared in the catalog for multiple years. One final note about our list: as I've mentioned, our list includes, for the most part, homes that we have located, ourselves, but also those that we have learned about from other people. As I detailed in the account of the rise and fall of the Sears empire, this literally led them to become the largest retailer in America because they had so many burners going at onceand their Modern Homes kits, and even the home buying process itself, were part of that in addition to catalog and retail sales. One of the most expensive models was the Magnolia, a 10-room Colonial-style house with. Architecturally, I'm really surprised by the two versions of the Cedars floor plan -- they are completely different, though only two feet were added to make the larger one. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Or did we just go wrong somewhere when someone decided the house you live in should be treated like a bank? , something that piqued my interest was the idea that you could buy literal houses from the catalog. In their own way, houses with Craftsman-style design elements often managed their own form of ebullient excess such as Modern Home No. House was moved to Carbondale, CO in about 1972, Still trying to find more info.. Ruth's Beauty Parlor: A Sears No. If you have any information on a Sears house or a style that is not identified, please notify the Preservation Commission. [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. Ohio and Illinois are still leading, though, with 2700+ and 2300+, respectively. This is a complete list of Sears houses in Aurora (and two in Montgomery that were originally in Aurora). by . Rebecca lives in Elgin, Illinois, and undertook a huge research project, to find, and document, kit houses in that town. Related: Floating Chairs and Texas McMansions | McMansions vs Really Big Houses | Strange Mansion in Carmel, Indiana | What is a Mansion. In fact, the No. 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 . So Betcone gave us a huge clue as to what the top seller for Sears was. [7] Early mortgage loans were typically for 5 to 15 years at 6% to 7% interest. [17] Later on in the Modern Homes timeline, Sears had in-office designers but titled them as "experts" rather than actual architects.[17]. Most of us have a small collection of physical catalogs, or PDF catalogs, but we rely heavily on resources provided, especially, by our friend at AntiqueHome.org, and Daily Bungalow. 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. 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". A number of those homes are featured on the organizations website. Really, they couldn't find any space in there for the Modern Homes records? Charleston, West Virginia is a hotspot for Sears model homes, in addition to Aladdin and Montgomery Ward homes. It's highly improbable that any model could hit the 1,700 mark. We thought it might be of interest to those readers to point out some more of the history of Sears houses in the greater Pittsburgh area, said Chabot, whose family still owns a Sears Silverdale model home in Northampton, Mass., that was built by her great-grandparents in 1911. Andrew is responsible for adding hundreds (and hundreds) of Sears houses to our database, especially in the Maryland suburbs of D.C., in numerous counties in Michigan, and a gold mine of houses in Westchester County, New York, especially in Yonkers. [4] Other homeowners relied on local carpenters or contractors to assemble the houses. rebeccahunter1216@gmail.com. But the houses don't match any of the designs that Sears sold in their catalogs. You'll also notice that the No. 159. It's likely that other Sears models can be traced to him as well. Tucker/Crossroads 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. In the story, homeowner Alicia Dallago said she had no idea the home she bought in 1998 was built from a kit. In it, they included excerpts from an interview with David S. Betcone, who was the chief architect for Sears at the time. She searched the Sears Home archive until she found a catalog with a photo and description of her home. Sears is estimated to have sold about 70,000 of their home building kits from 1908-1940 and its currently estimated that. There are many very close lookalikes to this model, so we aren't always confident that they are from Sears, when we spy them in the wild, but this house has Sears curlicues on the hinge end of the decorative iron strapping. 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. For more information on who we are, and what we do, visit our website: All photos in these blog posts are the property of the author of this blog- link to this blog. For this week's listing of the week, we decided to find seven charming Sears Catalog homes you can actually buy today. Please browse through and enjoy the 1,000+ posts and 5,000+ photos! to you on Flickr or Pinterest. This means that information about the Modern Homes department is scarce. Ive visited New Orleans several times and love the style of the buildings there. Historic house: Built in 1911, this Sears home sits on a large, corner lot in a historic district, surrounded by antebellum homes. By Posted on Mar 10, 2021. national database of sears homes. Weve got so much fucking housing just sitting there that NO ONE should be condemned to homelessness. Its not like nowadays where you move, wait for your stuff to arrive, and if youre a. like me, youre pretty much unable to work while you wait for a technician to ensure you have Internet access. Some Home Club homes have deeds from the "Port Newark Lumber and Material Company". 324 W Johnson Road Sears Jewel, Jewell, or Wilmore (depends on the year). We just can't say, because we can't access those records. While the bathroom and kitchen of this 1920 Sears mail-order house in Munhall called The Crescent have been updated, most of the homes original features remain unchanged, said owner Molly Harbst, who learned it was among the first homes built in her Homestead Park neighborhood. We also find street names that have changed (without our knowing that), or, especially for folks who bought their house in 1930-32 (the waning years of the mortgage program), we find that folks lost their homes during the depression, so we can't pin them down using the 1930 or 1940 census records. It's also possible that some local builder just put together a similar design, to compete with the Sears houses being built in town, but, some of these examples are on blocks of streets that are lined with Sears houses from this early spec offering by Sears. Also, homes in southern Ohio may have financing documents through the "Norwood Sash and Door Company" of Norwood, Ohio. If you have any authenticating source for us, we'd love to hear about it (you can email me directly at SearsHouseSeeker@gmail.com). 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. [35] Another homeowner, Erskine Hogue Stanberry, states that his Saratoga model was the "first house in Chelsea to have electric lights" and that they "are using the original plumbing and wiring".[35]. 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. 181, and the early version of the. 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. 217 (early Starlight), Sears Modern Home No, 126, on the left, at 808 W 11th Street, La Porte, Indiana, On the right, Sears Modern Home No. 172, later marketed as the. within a fe A very special, authenticated Aladdin home just hit the market in Takoma More than 100 years of stories, product and brand histories, photographs, catalog images and more are now available online. 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. The houses, comprising eight models, were all built in a 12-block area known as the Standard Addition. If your house was built between 1908-1940, theres a chance it might be an original Sears house. My daughter and son-in-law have a 1924 Homeville in Abington! Let's take a look at a comparison of that side, for these two models: Also, the front view shows us how the front porch roof connects to the house differently, across these two models. According to the US Census, there were about 88.7 million people living in the United States. 06/16/2022 . Other models only appeared for one year. This is just the top of the blog page you'll find dozens of links to online catalogs here, a link to the excellent Pinterest resource made for us by Sears-house owner Dale Haynes, and a list of hard-copy book resources that are both interesting and informative. Sears Modern Homes offered more than 370 designs in a wide range of architectural styles and sizes over the line's 34-year history. Sears Houses in Elgin, Illinois (Rebecca L. Hunter), BOOK:Houses By Mail -- published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, BOOK: History and Field Guide to Wardway Homes, Rosemary Thornton's Sears Modern Homes website (use to search for models), Beatrice Lask Thesis: Summary list (Cincinnati Sears Homes). Sales were down, and there was excess inventory languishing in warehouses. 1227 Disston St, Oxford Circle neighborhood of Philadelphia. Stamped lumber: Most easily found in unfinished spaces like a basement or attic, framing members were stamped with a letter and a number. Marie gives the perfect explanation of our Sears House hunt, in this. 159 has two full stories on that non-porch side of the house. They raised four kids in that house, Steel wrote. You can contact Tony by email at tlarussa@triblive.com or via Twitter . 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. Sears's use of "balloon style" framing systems did not require a team of skilled carpenters, as did previous methods. ", "How to Properly Identify a Sears Magnolia", "Have You Seen This Kit Schoolhouse? After all, future generations became more transient out of circumstance or in light of the digital nomad movement and taking advantage of technology in general, more mobile by choice. When the tiny house movement took off, many builders started offering everything from ready-made prehab homes to foundations and blueprints. While seeing a bunch of Sears homes jammed together in a cookie cutter suburb wasnt a very common sight in the 1930s and 40s, they still got knocked together like IKEA furniture compared to building a home from scratch.
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