While Sears no longer has records of where each of the nearly 75,000 mail-order homes it sold were built, it does main an extensive archive of the models that were available as well as the history of its Modern Homes division. Had the. A Newport Beach home remains dangerously close to tumbling down a cliffside after the ground underneath gave way on Friday morning. 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. In 1908, Sears issued its first specialty catalog for houses, Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans, featuring 44 house styles ranging in price from US $360$2,890. Thank you for visiting! 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. *Sears Americus - Temple, PA*It's been about 3 months since the last update Park, MD. 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. The. Because these homes were constructed using pre-cut lumber and plans provided by Sears, these homes can be considered to be "Sears Modern Homes". However, we are pretty much limited to counties which have online accessible historic records, and to counties which we are able to physically visit to search in person this means that there are some counties out there with lots of undiscovered Sears houses, because we can't get to the records. 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! We found and listed about three houses, I think but didn't really focus on La Porte much more than that day in 2015. Identifying Sears Homes has become a pastime among history enthusiasts because of their sturdy structure, the do-it-yourself nature of construction, and the popular architectural design concepts. Some models of Sears homes were very similar in design to models offered by other kit home manufacturers or through plan books. 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. Sears mail-order house kits can often be identified by the shipping labels that were placed on the backside of trim. Simple theme. 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. , in addition to Aladdin and Montgomery Ward homes. It wasnt until she was in her 20s that Chabot learned about the homes history. 06/16/2022 . Sears discontinued its Modern Homes catalog after 1940, though sales through local sales offices continued into 1942. 306 Highland, Madison, WI. We loosely refer to ourselves by the name. We soon realized that she had a keen eye for Sears houses (and a keen love for them, as her great-grandfather had built a Sears Martha Washington in Oakwood, Ohio), and she joined our research group. 1916 Sears Roebuck Modern Homes. 159. Precut lumber was cut to the appropriate lengths and angles based on where the framing timber would be used in the house. This label was discovered in a Sears Silverdale model home built in 1911 in Northhampton, Mass., by Judith Chabots grandparents. We cannot be absolutely certain, but the numbers do not support it. This is the Lakeview area where we found most of the examples of the 115, 171, and 159, as well as a number of examples of the No. Some builders and companies purchased houses directly from Sears to build as model homes, speculative homes, or homes for customers or employees. Click here. Lets find out! As its mail-order catalogs were already sent to millions of homes, Sears had a distinct advantage over other kit-home competitors. Lara was joined by researcher Cindy Catanzaro, who researches especially in Ohio, and writes the blog. If any of you have ever been interested in coming to see me do a kit home In this case, the problem was that we couldn't see the left side of these models, just by looking at the catalog and the floor plans. Thank you for visiting! Balloon frames could be built faster and generally only required one carpenter. within a fe A very special, authenticated Aladdin home just hit the market in Takoma We could make the assumption that the model we have located the most was, in fact, the top seller. By Posted on Mar 10, 2021. national database of sears homes. Measuring in at a roomy 3,500 square feet, the . 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. My father knew the local builder (Mr. Humphreys) who put the house together. If you don't know what that means, look at these two examples, and note where the orange arrow points that little extra strip of roofing that makes a sort of closed triangle. Thanks for giving me a new appreciation for the Argyle! Other Sears houses were found dotting other areas of La Porte, but the biggest concentration of the early models, probably all from 1912, were in that Lakeview area. Shipping label image from my mother's family's 1911 Sears No. Buyers could hire a contractor to assemble their home or build it themselves following the detailed instructions that were included. 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. Sears houses could also be ordered with reversed floor plans. 110 (, 1524 2nd Street, La Porte, Indiana earliest version of the Sears No. Sears' first kit houses sold for $650 to $2,500, or approximately $16,500 to $63,700 in today's dollars. 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. [37] Similiar references are made to boyhood homes of Richard Nixon and Warren Buffett. 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. Damn, it was like. Chabot can help people identify if their home was built from a Sears kit if they provide her with an address of the property through the House Seekers website, which also has links to catalogs produced by the company and other sellers. 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. That's not shown anywhere for this model, so we can't say for sure if these are examples of the No. CNDDB Maps and Data. To drum up business, Sears issued a press release to newspapers across the United States. The last Sears Modern Homes catalog was issued in 1940. We have three on our list in Glenside -- one on Cedar, one on Tyson, and one on Edge Hill Rd. The two-story schoolhouse was priced at $11,500 and its design included six classrooms, a library, an auditorium, and a superintendent's office. Lg Refrigerator Temperature Min Max, Cardinal Health 2017 Annual Report, How To Cook Lettuce Indian Style, Friday Brushed Canvas Extra Slipcovers, Pacinos Italian Family Restaurant Menu, Thekkady Tourist Places In Tamil, How To Get A Job At Target, , Cardinal Health 2017 Annual Report, How To Cook Lettuce Indian Style, Friday Brushed Canvas Extra 162 Sears houses still standing, including those in the city of Alexandria. Sears Modern Homes are something we totally need to bring back from the past for this. I love finding these houses and learning more about them, the different models that were sold and the people who bought them.. How did Sears Modern Homes come to be? I hope you found this informative, and learned that Sears houses come in lots of shapes, sizes, and styles. My daughter and son-in-law have a 1924 Homeville in Abington! Stamped lumber: Most easily found in unfinished spaces like a basement or attic, framing members were stamped with a letter and a number. 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. I was intrigued by the concept of people picking out a house from a catalog, she said. 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. Welcome to the New NSCAA. Construction of the houses took nine months which were completed in 1919. The houses made it as far as Alaska and Canada, as the parts were delivered by railroad. The kit was greatly modified by Lane's ambitious designs. 3 in U.S. with, at today's count, 1,963 Sears homes. See that curled element at the hinge edge? some ch Don't miss this never before seen catalog from Sears. The original "Sears Modern Homes" community page on Facebook, for those interested in Sears homes. Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois in particular are your best bet for finding Sears homes although Newark, New Jersey apparently still has a couple. marlon brando children; pete the cat and his four groovy buttons comprehension questions; nolin lake conditions; dan majerle hall of fame; dayton floor drill press,belt [16], There was no single architect for the Sears designs. The nine easy signs follow: 1) Look for stamped lumber in the basement or attic. 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. I know of several other models in McCandless. The wild pursuit began with an a [18] National and regional competitors in the catalog and kit home market included Aladdin, Bennett, Gordon-Van Tine, Harris Brothers, Lewis, Pacific Ready Cut Homes, Sterling and Montgomery Ward (Wardway) Homes. Molly Harbst of Munhall sent along photos of her beautifully preserved Sears homes a 1920 model called The Crescent after reading the article. This one, too, looks pretty much like just a taller version of the Greenview/115 and the Rossville/171, from the front and porch side of the house so, it was another mystery, as to what to look for on the other side of the house. Sold for 12 years and discontinued in 1928. If my house is not a kit, where did it come from? 181, and the early version of the. These stamps are normally located on or near the ends of pieces of framing timber. Capture from Google Streetview. 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". of the original Sears homes built from kits are still standing today. So, I put together a list, but I decided to provide some clarifying background information in that blog post, too-- it's especially intended to help those who might hear the term Craftsman, and think it means Sears House, or who see a 1920s bungalow and wonder if that means that the street is lined with Sears houses, or who find marked lumber in their house, but can't seem to find a match to a Sears model. 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. This is a complete list of Sears houses in Aurora (and two in Montgomery that were originally in Aurora). In the early years, the models were identified with numbers. There is some debate about whether some homes from Sears that were built in 1941 and 1942 qualify as Sears Modern Homes. The HMS data portal is a collection of models, simulations and synthetic observations of the Sun. Action in the Community Through Service Homeless Shelter. People always seemed surprised to learn that Sears sold home kits. Sales peaked in 1929, just before the Great Depression. 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! This means that information about the Modern Homes department is scarce. 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. Run by experienced researcher Cindy Catanzaro (with a little help from yours truly). Given the more disposable nature of shipping container homes and the portability granted by some tiny houses, its kind of sad in a way that this current crop of Internet-order homes is not only not as simple or affordable as it was yesteryear, but also carries less permanence compared to these mail-order houses. Looking at the sorry state of Americas rail infrastructure today, this also makes me weep although today theyd just be delivered via truck. Images are available Ha! If those were the top sellers, no model could catch the Argyle at that rate. easier. Rosemary Thornton We certainly imagine that the houses have been retro-fitted with one, at this point. Fast forward to this past summer --early August of 2022. Powered by, This September 2017 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, this short video story by the Washington Post. Public records: From 1911 to 1933, Sears offered home mortgages and Sears company officials or the Sears, Roebuck corporation may be named on the mortgage or deed associated with the property where the home was constructed. Did materials and labor really get that much more expensive between now and then? Kmart History | Search Archives | Sears Holdings Alumni | sears.com | kmart.com : Thursday, Mar. Her parents did not care much for the house and eventually moved back into their original farmhouse. Many of the homes original features remain intact. People need move-in ready housing and they need it fast, whether single professionals are seeking apartments and luxury condos or families need affordable freestanding houses. 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. Either way, these houses offered variety and quality even if they werent necessarily innovative. 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. As only a small percentage of these homes were documented when built, finding these houses today often requires detailed research to properly identify them. 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. According to Betcone, the two models that were the top sellers for Sears in 1930 totaled just over 100 houses a year. 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. 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. A Gilded Mansion in Newport Beach, CA (Unreal), Fallen Titan that is Sears department stores. Early on, we were joined by Sarah Mullane, who lives in North Tonawanda, New York. He published the design as #466 in his 1912 "Craftsman Bungalows" catalog. Balloon framing systems rely only on nails to make connections between joints, whereas previous methods used heavier members and pegs. 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. After several years, Sears also began assigning names to the various models. 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. Some models were offered with variations, the most common of those being expanded floor plans and additional finished living spaces. If your house was built between 1908-1940, theres a chance it might be an original Sears house. You usually just left with the clothes on your back and a few trunks, and that was it. 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. 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 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. 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. 3 in U.S. with, at todays count, 1,963 Sears homes found.. Researching Historic Kit and Plan Book Homes, We started looking around La Porte, Indiana, in 2015. Sometimes the legal description is nice and straightforward, like, "lot 15, block C, Tanglewood Estates, in the town of Dunham". 2) Look for shipping labels. This was the case with most of the compact pre-1920 Sears houses. national database of sears homes. We saw that on numerous Rossville/No. 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. If home is where the heart is, then those living in houses built from Sears mail-order kits may have fallen head-over-heels. 118 In Columbia, Where are the Sears Houses - February 2023 Edition, The Strange Case of the Wandering Bungalow, DC House Cat Chiming In - Historic Mail-Order Homes, Same Name, Different House Part 2 - From Aurora to the Elmwood, 1926 Sears Special Supplement from AntiqueHome.org. At Greenlawn Cemetery, near the Hampton Roads waterfront in the Newport News, Virginia, area, the cemetery office building is a 1936 Sears Modern Home. sub 2:15 half marathon training plan; national database of sears homes. Park, MD. Browse the list below to see if there are Modern Homes in your excited about this find and I really hope it is one: a Sears No. There are two examples of this model, in La Porte. . 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. 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. Here is a year-by-year list of houses as they were advertised in the Sears Modern Homes catalogs. In it, they included excerpts from an interview with David S. Betcone, who was the chief architect for Sears at the time. 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 . 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. One of the most expensive models was the Magnolia, a 10-room Colonial-style house with. Its as sturdy as a house as Ive ever seen. If my house is not a kit, where did it come from? Here is one of the eleven examples in La Porte: This early version of the No. Enjoy! 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). Charleston, West Virginia is a hotspot for Sears model homes, in addition to Aladdin and Montgomery Ward homes. Welcome to Sears Homes! Interested in hearing about Rose's near-death experience? If you have any authenticating source for us, we'd love to hear about it (you can email me directly at [email protected]). 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. Following is a list of Sears Homes enthusiasts who have agreed to share their names with others who might be interested in contacting them by clicking on their name. Sears Modern Homes were catalog and kit houses sold primarily through mail order by Sears, Roebuck and Co., an American retailer. 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. 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. 5 Jun. 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. What was up with this particular model of home building, and are there any original Sears houses left? More than 100 years of stories, product and brand histories, photographs, catalog images and more are now available online. Sears offered 370 models over the 32 years it sold houses by 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. Harbst said many of the original features in her home are intact and the exterior remains mostly unchanged. I think that one of our researchers, Lara Solonickne. When the. [4] Other homeowners relied on local carpenters or contractors to assemble the houses. Our goal is always to authenticate these houses through mortgage and deed research, or other primary sources, but, when that is not possible, we apply a careful, team approach to analyzing each house that goes on our national list. This Sears mail-order house named The Crescent was built in Munhall in 1920, according to owner Molly Harbst. That, still, is only helpful if we can find a plat map online for a subdivision called Tanglewood Estates! Or did we just go wrong somewhere when someone decided the house you live in should be treated like a bank? The American Lumberman article referred to this area where the houses were being built, as the Fairview neighborhood. took off, many builders started offering everything from ready-made prehab homes to foundations and blueprints. 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. Here is the catalog image, from the 1911/12 catalog: And here are two examples in La Porte. It's likely that other Sears models can be traced to him as well. I'm sure it was Matthew who cleared up for me that the No. 126 and a Sears No. 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. Excuse me while I openly weep thinking about how many vacation cottages today probably cost the same or even more than house houses in many parts of the country. The iron strapping itself can be strait or curved, but the curlicue is always there, if it's iron strapping from Sears. Call me a cynic, but I often wonder why kit houses were not stolen. During the Modern Homes program, large quantities of asphalt shingles became available. 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.