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, Sears No 137 In Mendham, New Jersey, Morris County. Many included the latest technology available to house buyers in the early part of the twentieth century, such as central heating, indoor plumbing, telephone, and electricity . Simple theme. 1. [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. some ch Don't miss this never before seen catalog from Sears. Images are available Your comment will appear after it has been previewed and approved by the blog author. Sometimes researchers get lucky and find facts and figures in old company newsletters, personal papers of Sears managers and executives, historical newspapers, and archival interviews conducted with people who worked in the department in the 1930's and 1940's. In a second blog post, I'll show the several probable kit houses that we've found in LaPorte, Indiana, from other companies. Thanks for giving me a new appreciation for the Argyle! 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. national database of sears homes - dowdcreative.com Keep in mind, however, that even though we have found well over 200 Sears houses in the PA and NJ suburbs of Philadelphia, those are densely populated areas. Contains merger trees and halo . 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. 920 North Madison Avenue, Anderson, Indiana Asking: $379,900 Sears Roebuck Model: Elmhurst Year Built: 1932 Listing Agent: Julie Armington Listing Brokerage: F.C. The original "Sears Modern Homes" community page on Facebook, for those interested in Sears 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, 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. This Sears mail-order kit home in McCandless is owned by Normajean Moser. Dover, Chateau, and Lexington models are particularly plentiful there! If you have any authenticating source for us, we'd love to hear about it (you can email me directly at SearsHouseSeeker@gmail.com). national database of sears homes - onehundredeggs.com Newport Beach home dangling on edge after cliff collapses Our national database of Sears houses in the U.S., is constantly growing, with over 13,600 homes currently listed. Their blueprints were based on what was popular at the time and while they werent the first or only company to do mail-order houses, theyre among the most memorable because you could buy damn near anything in their 500+ page catalogs. The iron strapping itself can be strait or curved, but the curlicue is always there, if it's iron strapping from Sears. 181, Sears No. And, shortly after me, came Karen DeJeet, a Pittsburgh resident who learned of Sears houses when she found out that she lived in one (the. 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". So, each house that we find through these records, represents a great deal of digging, and lots of amassed knowledge in how to attack the task because each county's records system is a little different than others. Sears began offering financing plans around 1912. We just can't say, because we can't access those records. We've found examples from the Wardway, Gordon-Van Tine, Harris Homes, and Ray H. Bennett companies. And Sears Modern Homes werent a monolith. Click on any of the linked house listings to view a picture . 264B155. 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). 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. 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? 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. The houses made it as far as Alaska and Canada, as the parts were delivered by railroad. Among those chiming in about the article was Judith Chabot of St. Louis, Mo., who runs SearsHouseSeekers.com, which serves as a depository for information gathered by Sears home enthusiasts across the country. There is some debate about whether some homes from Sears that were built in 1941 and 1942 qualify as Sears Modern Homes. 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. PDF See the video of my interview on the St. Louis Business Journal's website. Powered by, This September 2017 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, this short video story by the Washington Post. The house forms part of the farmstead at the museum.[40]. You can contact Tony by email at tlarussa@triblive.com or via Twitter . Another gabled ell farmhouse that we found quite a few of in La Porte, is the No. [7] Early mortgage loans were typically for 5 to 15 years at 6% to 7% interest. A Gilded Mansion in Newport Beach, CA (Unreal), Fallen Titan that is Sears department stores. This label was discovered in a Sears Silverdale model home built in 1911 in Northhampton, Mass., by Judith Chabots grandparents. The first mail order for a Sears house was filled that year. They raised four kids in that house, Steel wrote. Charleston, West Virginia is a hotspot for Sears model homes, in addition to Aladdin and Montgomery Ward homes. This Sears mail-order house named The Crescent was built in Munhall in 1920, according to owner Molly Harbst. Early on, we were joined by Sarah Mullane, who lives in North Tonawanda, New York. Another old model found predominantly in that Lakeview area, was the. However, as you can see in the photos above, that showed the sides of the house, the Rossville/No. 06/16/2022 . 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. 171 often has a full front porch that ends up extending all the way to the left side of the house. R.L. Hunter Press: Mail Order House Research 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. 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). Prefab homes arent exactly an exotic concept nowadays. 172, later marketed as the. BMO, LAFC, and Angel City FC leaders were joined by special guests Earvin "Magic" Johnson and Mia Hamm for the . The mortgage program was also a PR disaster, as many of the families Sears foreclosed upon refused to do further business with the company. 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 . This table provides a Streetview link for each house (or, occasionally, a real estate listing link), and, for houses I've shown, but not provided a catalog image of, you'll find a link to a catalog image, as well. 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. No built examples have been found of some of the least popular models. They had 447 different styles that ranged from simple and rustic to utterly decadent. 181, and the early version of the. 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. Sears licensed the plans for the Argyle from a. real estate builder/developer named Jud Yoho. 168 / Matoka: I am really (really!) Despite being prefab, they got more character than the endless sea of suburban eyesores we got out there now. If you have any information on a Sears house or a style that is not identified, please notify the Preservation Commission. Open to the public. A kick-off celebration was held March 3, 2023, for the newly renamed BMO Stadium. Asphalt shingles were cheap to manufacture and ship, and easy and inexpensive to install. Is My House a Sears House? The Nine Easy Signs. - Sears Modern Homes Whitehouse. Stevenson, Katherine Cole, and Jandl, H. Ward, (1995), Davis, Michael W.R. and Schweitzer, Robert (1990), This page was last edited on 4 March 2023, at 21:18. 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. , there were about 88.7 million people living in the United States. presentation, nows your chance! 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. Modern Home 264B155 - Two-story Craftsman-style Bungalow - 1916 Sears Im looking at this cute little Cape Cod that was $886 in 1940 dollars, about $16,000 today. Sometimes the legal description is nice and straightforward, like, "lot 15, block C, Tanglewood Estates, in the town of Dunham". Here is the catalog image, from the 1911/12 catalog: And here are two examples in La Porte. Call me a cynic, but I often wonder why kit houses were not stolen. How do we know another house didn't outsell the Argyle after 1931? Excuse me while I openly weep thinking about how many vacation cottages today probably cost the same or even more than, 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. It was just recently sold again earlier this year. I have seen articles throughout the years about Sears homes in the Pittsburgh area, she wrote after reading the Trib story. Browse the list below to see if there are Modern Homes in your city or state, or to find someone who owns the same model as you. 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. Lara Solonickne, who writes the blog. 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 moving easier. 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. At one point, I realized that I needed to organize a list of online catalog resources, so I put together this blog post, which has links to catalogs not only from Daily Bungalow and AntiqueHome, but to the many catalogs uploaded on another key resource, Archive.org (have you donated lately?). Shipped by railroad boxcar, and then usually trucked to a home site, the average Sears Modern Home kit had about 25 tons of materials, with more than 30,000 parts. Were most Sears Houses built by the owners? However, in La Porte, we've also found five examples* of houses that look like a great match for the No. Our research team especially loves searching Pennsylvania for Sears houses because there are so many there, Chabot said. took off, many builders started offering everything from ready-made prehab homes to foundations and blueprints. 175 (in 1913). [8] By 1934, Sears had stopped offering mortgages. 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. When the. Fast forward to this past summer --early August of 2022. While the vast majority of models were for single-family house designs, Sears offered some duplex house designs and even a few larger multiple-family buildings.
