national database of sears homes

Marie's great-grandfather, Freeman Pretzinger, built this Sears. Because lets get real: affordable ranchers were only for CERTAIN veterans, 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. BMO, LAFC, and Angel City FC leaders were joined by special guests Earvin "Magic" Johnson and Mia Hamm for the . Here is the Uriel or Conway at 408 Bond Street. We loosely refer to ourselves by the name. [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. Compare house designs to original catalog images. This means that information about the Modern Homes department is scarce. It was just recently sold again earlier this year. In areas where the land is already mostly developed and zoned, its not that simple. "The Sears Homes of Illinois" has more than 200 color photos of the most popular designs that Sears offered and can be very helpful in identifying Sears Homes. Spatial information is available through GIS downloads or can be viewed in the BIOS Viewer. Sears' first kit houses sold for $650 to $2,500, or approximately $16,500 to $63,700 in today's dollars. . 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. We maintain the National Database of Sears Houses in the U.S., where we add new finds, almost daily. If any of you have ever been interested in coming to see me do a kit home Looks like Yoho probably bought plan #466 from H. L. Wilson, the actual designer. Prefab homes arent exactly an exotic concept nowadays. Chabot focuses her research on scouring mortgages and deed records, old newspaper articles and other sources to identify kit homes sold by Sears. Harbst said many of the original features in her home are intact and the exterior remains mostly unchanged. How Many Sears Houses Are Still Out There? 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). Sears Modern Homes offered more than 370 designs in a wide range of architectural styles and sizes over the line's 34-year history. Square . I now live in St. Louis, Missouri, and am sometimes asked if there are any Sears houses here. Walker O. Lewis (primarily before early 1930), William C. Reed (primarily from 1922 - 1929), Nicholas Wieland (sometimes spelled Weiland), Shipping labels: Often found on the back of. This is the case for the southern New Jersey counties that are suburbs of Philadelphia. They kept up with it, of course, but it sure has good bones. But what if you want something bigger than a tiny house, but not as gargantuan as the average American single family home? easier. Her parents did not care much for the house and eventually moved back into their original farmhouse. Sears Modern Homes offered more than 370 designs in a wide range of architectural styles and sizes over the line's 34-year history. Whatever Happened to Those Mail-Order Houses From the Sears Catalog? Chuck Holtzen has joined up with Lara to do research in Illinois, and has been helpful in adding a number of authenticated houses to our list. The larger Victorian-style houses that were already there and scant in number were out of reach for working class first-time home buyers. 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. Thank you for visiting! 1916 Sears Roebuck Modern Homes. 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 Atlanta and Chateau models were probably the great-grandaddy of the modern McMansion, with the Malden model being its odd little cousin that sits in the potato salad at the family reunion, what with the odd arrangement of dormer windows although they arent fake. Between 1908 and 1940, Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold nearly 75,000 kit homes through its Modern Homes program, which featured 447 styles of houses, ranging from large multistory dwellings to tiny summer cottages with an optional outhouse. Telephone 847-697-4551. www.kithouse.org. Call me a cynic, but I often wonder why kit houses were not stolen. What was up with this particular model of home building, and are there any original Sears houses left? Please contact me if you would like a free This phrase is trademarked and cannot be used without permission of Ricky Bobby, Inc. 175 (in 1913). 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. 4120 Adams St., Gary, IN. 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. Sears Modern Homes were catalog and kit houses sold primarily through mail order by Sears, Roebuck and Co., an American retailer. Tony LaRussa is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Thanks for your interest! 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. Welcome to Sears Homes! During the Modern Homes program, large quantities of asphalt shingles became available. But articles are so scattered by time, date and location that it is difficult to realize the scope and number of Sears homes here in the Pittsburgh area.. Residential construction was drastically down nationwide due to the Great Depression. Originally marketed as the. I believe my parents were the 3rd owners purchasing the house in 1965 or 1966. 217 was not shown with an in-house bathroom. Hi, Lauren! If you are a Historical Society interested in awarding plaques for specific homes understood to be Sears houses, please feel free to contact us to verify for you that the house does match a model offered in the Sears Modern Homes catalogs. It looks almost like a Sears, And, finally, we have this pretty rare model, the Sears. Because these homes were constructed using pre-cut lumber and plans provided by Sears, these homes can be considered to be "Sears Modern Homes". 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. So this blog has been radio silent for a while now! Builders that already have both the funds and the skilled professionals in architecture, construction, and land use make it easier for the average person who only wants to worry about their career, move, and family. If those were the top sellers, no model could catch the Argyle at that rate. The house was in original condition and was never modified while we lived there - it was sold in 2003 or early 2004. Original paperwork for the house including blueprints and letters of correspondence from Sears. Photo from Realtor site. Beginning in 1916, the catalogs showed an additional floor plan that did have a bathroom: The rest of the examples of Sears houses in La Porte, that we have found to date, are one-off examples, so were probably individual purchases by the original homeowner, or a few spec houses by the realty company mentioned in the American Lumberman article. They had 447 different styles that ranged from simple and rustic to utterly decadent. The houses made it as far as Alaska and Canada, as the parts were delivered by railroad. Where Are The Rest Of The Sears Houses In The U.S.? I think that maybe Google maps Streetview wasn't great quality on many of the streets. 306 Highland, Madison, WI. Some Home Club homes have deeds from the "Port Newark Lumber and Material Company". 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. Harbst said it wasnt until after she bought the house that she learned homes were once sold through mail-order catalogs. 3 in U.S. with, at todays count, 1,963 Sears homes found.. By Posted on Mar 10, 2021. national database of sears homes. by . Did materials and labor really get that much more expensive between now and then? Researchers Cindy Catanzaro and Andrew Mutch, and the late Donna Bakke, put together a document explaining Bea's work, and listing 345 of the houses that she found, which you can see. 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. 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. 162 Sears houses still standing, including those in the city of Alexandria. 920 North Madison Avenue, Anderson, Indiana Asking: $379,900 Sears Roebuck Model: Elmhurst Year Built: 1932 Listing Agent: Julie Armington Listing Brokerage: F.C. Andrew spotted these two houses right next to each other, on W 11th Street: a No. Others were not but were still pre-cut kit homes built from plans and materials from Sears. All these years later it is still a fortress.. Species: 4,512; Preserves: 238; Sightings: 95,174 . 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. Simply put, life was rougher. You can contact Tony by email at tlarussa@triblive.com or via Twitter . Sears discontinued its Modern Homes catalog after 1940, though sales through local sales offices continued into 1942. Chabot runs a national website dedicated to gathering and sharing information about Sears mail-order homes. Several Sears Modern Homes are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Compare that to about 330 million people today. It was built in 1917. Some of the most popular models were:[12], The largest and one of the most expensive Sears models was the Magnolia. 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. Here is one at 17 Hill Street, Villa Park. Tucker/Crossroads The group has identified 2,700 Sears homes in Ohio and 2,300 in Illinois. The Preservation Commission has identified a majority of the styles, but since many are modified it can be hard to tell. Photo from Realtor site. Or, perhaps we have background information about it to share with you!Judith. Other models only appeared for one year. 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. Carrying on with Same Name, Different House topic we find that some of the After several years, Sears also began assigning names to the various models. Because lets get real: those adorable and affordable ranchers were only for CERTAIN veterans and their families. Thats cheaper than many tiny houses and with space to actually breathe and have more than one person live with you without wanting to kill each other. There havent been any major structural changes, she said. But David Betcone told us what model was in first place as of 1931. 1. 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. This Sears mail-order kit home in McCandless is owned by Normajean Moser. So this blog has been radio silent for a while now! 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. Price: $179,900. Not all Sears houses became private residences. Cities that have records of building permits may list Sears, Roebuck as the original architect. We cannot be absolutely certain, but the numbers do not support it. There is some debate about whether some homes from Sears that were built in 1941 and 1942 qualify as Sears Modern Homes. Following is a list of Sears Homes enthusiasts who have agreed 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. Many of the famous designs were commandeered from other sources and/or purchased from architects but given just enough change to be advertised as their own. This site is a tribute to the original Sears Houses in Cincinnati [4] Other homeowners relied on local carpenters or contractors to assemble the houses. Sure, your Wabash or Verona model 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. In their own way, houses with Craftsman-style design elements often managed their own form of ebullient excess such as Modern Home No. ", "Sears Houses of Massapequa Park, New York", "Made to Order: Many American Dreams Came Out of the Sears Catalog, Including Do-It-Yourself Houses", "Yesterday's kit houses are today's sought-after properties", "The Story on Sears: Houses by rail and mail", "Syracuse house, which came from a Sears catalog, is one of only seven of its kind in U.S.", "The House Is in the Mail: 'Kit homes' from Sears and others were an affordable housing option", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sears_Modern_Homes&oldid=1142882633, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. excited about this find and I really hope it is one: a Sears No. 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. We have three on our list in Glenside -- one on Cedar, one on Tyson, and one on Edge Hill Rd. Despite being prefab, they got more character than the endless sea of suburban eyesores we got out there now. That's not shown anywhere for this model, so we can't say for sure if these are examples of the No. Balloon framing systems rely only on nails to make connections between joints, whereas previous methods used heavier members and pegs. muhammad ali i am the greatest speech transcript . If home is where the heart is, then those living in houses built from Sears mail-order kits may have fallen head-over-heels. Contains merger trees and halo . some ch Don't miss this never before seen catalog from Sears. 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.. Powered by, This September 2017 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, this short video story by the Washington Post. We have not surveyed all areas of the country equally. Click here. June 1, 2022. by etc north vernon covid testing. 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. 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. In the companys own words, Sears didnt really innovate home building. . I have the Farnum in New Brighton PA. 1929. [7] Early mortgage loans were typically for 5 to 15 years at 6% to 7% interest. Wonderful, Malissa! She said she also didnt know it was a mail-order house when she bought it 14 years ago. The Rossville/No. 126 and a Sears No. That's what happens Researching Historic Kit and Plan Book Homes. The best guidebook to the basic history of the Sears Modern Homes program, is the book, Houses By Mail, put out by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and written by Katherine Cole Stevenson and H. Ward Jandl. PDF See the video of my interview on the St. Louis Business Journal's website. to share their names with others who might be interested in Many of these homes were built in Sears planned "Home Club Plan" developments in New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.[9][10][11]. 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. Normajean Moser of McCandless owns a Walton model that was purchased from the Sears Modern Home catalog. Welcome to Sears Homes! But the houses don't match any of the designs that Sears sold in their catalogs. Sears also offered a plasterboard product similar to modern drywall as an alternative to the plaster and lath wall-building techniques which required skilled carpenters and plasterers. Please browse through and enjoy the 1,000+ posts and 5,000+ photos! Among those are: Sears Modern Homes can also be found in historic districts listed in the National Register of Historic Places: According to Carolyn Fraser's Pulitzer-winning book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the house that Rose Wilder Lane built for her parents, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almanzo Wilder, at Rocky Ridge Farm in Missouri was from a Sears kit. 324 W Johnson Road Sears Jewel, Jewell, or Wilmore (depends on the year). Those kinds of topics are cleared up, in this blog post: When I chatted with Kevin Riordan, I also sent him a list of several nice Sears houses that he could consider photographing for his article in the Philadelphia Inquirer. 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. Here is the catalog image, from the 1911/12 catalog: And here are two examples in La Porte. 171 examples in La Porte. The house forms part of the farmstead at the museum.[40]. Images are available 181, and the early version of the. While researching the property, Harbst learned it was among the first homes built in the boroughs Homestead Park neighborhood. 168/Matoka, 301 Weller Avenue, La Porte, Indiana probable Sears Modern Home No. 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. 3 in U.S. with, at today's count, 1,963 Sears homes. Dover, Chateau, and Lexington models are particularly plentiful there! website, which was published from Oct 2013 to Nov 2014. There are examples of modern homes built based on the design of Sears Modern Home. You can find catalog images for these models, in the links on the table at the end of this blog post: Also on W Johnson Road, we have new information from Nancy, who contacted me to let me know that she grew up in the Sears house shown below, a Sears. Sears is estimated to have sold about 70,000 of their home building kits from 1908-1940 and its currently estimated that about 70% of the original Sears homes built from kits are still standing today. Parts for the homes, which were sold between 1908 and 1940, were delivered to the nearest rail station. The bulk order is the largest known order for Sears Modern Homes and led to Sears, Roebuck naming their "Carlin" model after the city. I hope you found this informative, and learned that Sears houses come in lots of shapes, sizes, and styles. Fabricated houses sold primarily through mail order, Column detail from a Sears Vallonia house, pictured alongside its appearance in the catalog, Modern interpretations of Sears Modern Homes, "Did Sears, Roebuck Sell Homes in Canada? Had the. You'll also notice that the No. Primarily shipped via railroad boxcars, these kits included most of the materials needed to build a house. The wild pursuit began with an a Determining which company manufactured a particular catalog and kit home may require additional research to determine the origin of that home. There were about 132 million people by the time Sears stopped selling Sears Modern Homes kits in 1940. . Dover, Chateau, and Lexington models are particularly plentiful there! None of these houses are authenticated through mortgage or deed research, but they are spot-on matches for the models, and we feel certain enough of their origin, to add them to our database. national database of sears homes. During the later era of pre-cut houses, we don't usually put homes on our list, if they have these kinds of design differences. Balloon frames could be built faster and generally only required one carpenter. 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. They raised four kids in that house, Steel wrote. [13] Only seven Magnolias are known to be still standing. According to Betcone, the two models that were the top sellers for Sears in 1930 totaled just over 100 houses a year. I don't know the model, but it was a 2 story - 6 room house - 3 bedrooms, 1 bath, living room, dining room, and very small galley type kitchen. This is a complete list of Sears houses in Aurora (and two in Montgomery that were originally in Aurora). Orders were placed by mail, the See more 5,581 people like this 5,890 people follow this https://www.searshouses.com/ cyn.catanzaro@gmail.com | 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.? 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. This system used precut timber of mostly standard sizes (2"x4" and 2"x8") for framing. 2) Look for shipping labels. That's what happens The suburbs of Philadelphia are not the only places where we find Sears houses, by the way. If you have any information on a Sears house or a style that is not identified, please notify the Preservation Commission. Once delivered, many of these houses were assembled by the new homeowner, relatives, friends and neighbors, in a fashion similar to the traditional barn-raisings of farming families. 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. Photo from Realtor site. You usually just left with the clothes on your back and a few trunks, and that was it. However, as you can see in the photos above, that showed the sides of the house, the Rossville/No. We have a database of all the models that have been identified nationwide to date. Click on any of the linked house listings to view a picture . My uncle mentioned that he had found some shipping labels from Sears in the house and when we asked my grandmother about it, she said: Oh, yes, we ordered it from the Sears catalog, Chabot said. Capture from Google Streetview. 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 . TribLIVE's Daily and Weekly email newsletters deliver the news you want and information you need, right to your inbox. I've always seen this one in the catalogs, and thought it was kind of ungainly in proportions, but we hadn't found one before this one this is a pretty good match, though not perfect, but, in the days before pre-cut, we are more likely to see some modifications to the models. 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. The mortgage program was also a PR disaster, as many of the families Sears foreclosed upon refused to do further business with the company. small-town America even into the 1940 census). These pre-1916 houses are generally considered "catalog houses", not "kit houses". 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". ", "How to Properly Identify a Sears Magnolia", "Have You Seen This Kit Schoolhouse? Here is a year-by-year list of houses as they were advertised in the Sears Modern Homes catalogs. I think that one of our researchers, Lara Solonickne. within a fe A very special, authenticated Aladdin home just hit the market in Takoma website, which was published from Oct 2013 to Nov 2014. But who knows, maybe well see tiny shipping container homes in a museum someday after we take back the rest of the real estate after the revolution. Marie gives the perfect explanation of our Sears House hunt, in this. 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. Sears offered 370 models over the 32 years it sold houses by catalog. One Magnolia built in Lincoln, Nebraska, was demolished in 1985. Thanks to the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of the California Native Plant Society, the NRDB will continue to be updated and available at least through 2023, and in some form, beyond that. 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. But Matthew has a way of pulling everything together and spitting out a coherent comparative analysis with visuals that helps us see what we hadn't noticed previously. But, as of this date in 2021, here are leading areas in the U.S. with high numbers of Sears houses. Checklist Search provides a simple and fast way to generate a pre-formatted checklist suitable for printing. At Greenlawn Cemetery, near the Hampton Roads waterfront in the Newport News, Virginia, area, the cemetery office building is a 1936 Sears Modern Home. The Sears Argyle was a small house, about 1,000 square feet, and many of them have been demolished. More information, in this blog post of mine, documented through historic mortgage research, by Andrew Mutch, Philadelphia Inquirer article by Kevin Riordan, 418 Woodlawn Ave, Collingswood, NJ 08108, USA, 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. I'm sure it was Matthew who cleared up for me that the No. The two-story schoolhouse was priced at $11,500 and its design included six classrooms, a library, an auditorium, and a superintendent's office. took off, many builders started offering everything from ready-made prehab homes to foundations and blueprints. 159 was available with either clipped gables or peak gables, for the roof. presentation, nows your chance! Run by experienced researcher Cindy Catanzaro (with a little help from yours truly). city or state, or to find someone who owns the same model as you. Sears houses can be identified or authenticated using the following methods.