national database of sears homes

1232 / No. A kick-off celebration was held March 3, 2023, for the newly renamed BMO Stadium. This Sears mail-order house named The Crescent was built in Munhall in 1920, according to owner Molly Harbst. Photo from Lake County Assessor. 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. 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. In a second blog post, I'll show the several probable kit houses that we've found in LaPorte, Indiana, from other companies. 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. 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. House was moved to Carbondale, CO in about 1972, Still trying to find more info.. 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. There are examples of modern homes built based on the design of Sears Modern Home. Data Portal - NASA As only a small percentage of these homes were documented when built, finding these houses today often requires detailed research to properly identify them. Asphalt shingles were cheap to manufacture and ship, and easy and inexpensive to install. Run by experienced researcher Cindy Catanzaro (with a little help from yours truly). 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. The House that Came in the Mail - 99% Invisible to you on Flickr or Pinterest. 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. 1232 click. Capture from Google Streetview. Related: Floating Chairs and Texas McMansions | McMansions vs Really Big Houses | Strange Mansion in Carmel, Indiana | What is a Mansion. Early on, we were joined by Sarah Mullane, who lives in North Tonawanda, New York. Here is the Uriel or Conway at 408 Bond Street. Argyles also have a tendency to hide. 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! Researching Historic Kit and Plan Book Homes. ", "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. The builder was W.L. Sales were down, and there was excess inventory languishing in warehouses. 06/16/2022 . Sears began offering financing plans around 1912. And it led me to dig a little deeper into the history of my community.. 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. Sears Modern Homes were kit homes and the framing members were stamped with a letter and a number to help facilitate construction. 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 nine easy signs follow: 1) Look for stamped lumber in the basement or attic. You can contact Rose through her Facebook group, "Sears Kit Homes" or email: Magnolia2047@gmail.com. Sears has opened the doors to its vast archival collection and invited the public to peek inside. According to the catalog image, both models have only a partial porch at the front of the house. 1916 Sears Roebuck Modern Homes. 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. Once again true to the companys roots, youre more apt to find Sears catalog homes still standing in former factory towns of the Midwest. 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. The Preservation Commission has identified a majority of the styles, but since many are modified it can be hard to tell. Wonderful, Malissa! If you have any authenticating source for us, we'd love to hear about it (you can email me directly at SearsHouseSeeker@gmail.com). A Newport Beach home remains dangerously close to tumbling down a cliffside after the ground underneath gave way on Friday morning. These pre-1916 houses are generally considered "catalog houses", not "kit houses". 264B155. 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. *Sears Americus - Temple, PA*It's been about 3 months since the last update Statewide, about 1,900 Sears catalog homes have been identified. Spatial information is available through GIS downloads or can be viewed in the BIOS Viewer. The article mentioned Sears having sold 50 houses in La Porte, Indiana but, interestingly, Sears had actually provided the funding and the houses, knowing that the area was in need of housing right away, and offered to have the houses paid for on time. 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. Im looking at this cute little Cape Cod that was $886 in 1940 dollars, about $16,000 today. Years later, the sales records related to home sales were destroyed during a corporate house cleaning. 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.. 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. Many of these homes were built in Sears planned "Home Club Plan" developments in New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.[9][10][11]. Through those two resources, we can see not only kit-house catalogs, but also lumber-yard plan books, which offered house plans to those who were building their homes, in the 19-teens through 1930s, in the traditional method, of hiring a contractor, and buying the building resources locally. 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). On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. 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. 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. presentation, nows your chance! 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. when you switch jobs, buy a house, and go on an international trip, all Powered by, Table of Sears Houses in La Porte, Indiana. , 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. website, which was published from Oct 2013 to Nov 2014. Freestanding suburban or rural homes were more likely to stand alone in undeveloped lots instead of planned tracts that were set aside by federal and state governments and/or builders that had uniformity in mind. Our national database of Sears houses in the U.S., is constantly growing, with over 13,600 homes currently listed. This picture came from an original set of Sears "Honor Bilt" blueprints. national database of sears homes. Buyers could hire a contractor to assemble their home or build it themselves following the detailed instructions that were included. 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. The group has identified 2,700 Sears homes in Ohio and 2,300 in Illinois. 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 most popular models appeared in the catalog for multiple years. Our list, by the way, began in the early years of our research group. We just love the Walton model! Boxabl 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. Our home also resembles the Bedford Model # P3249, 1926 (this was not in your listings). 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. 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. Sears Modern Homes - Home | Facebook Sears Homes Enthusiasts I think that we had only a handful of houses already on the list a few. Following is a list of Sears Homes enthusiasts who have agreed The original "Sears Modern Homes" community page on Facebook, for those interested in Sears homes. catalogs for all central and satellite halos down to 10^06 MSun. We scour real estate listings, we "drive" around streets (using Google maps Streetview) in towns with a concentration of homes of the era, and we especially love researching, using primary sources such as historic newspapers and the old mortgage and deed resources held in each town's Register of Deeds office, looking for houses that were financed through Sears. Philadelphia Inquirer: Sears Homes In the Philly S 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. Thanks for your interest! Its as sturdy as a house as Ive ever seen. Tony LaRussa is a Tribune-Review staff writer. 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. 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. "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. During the Modern Homes program, large quantities of asphalt shingles became available. We could make the assumption that the model we have located the most was, in fact, the top seller. Before 1916, the home builder had to cut their Sears-supplied lumber to appropriate lengths. 172/ Hazelton, at 810 W 11th Street, La Porte, Indiana. She searched the Sears Home archive until she found a catalog with a photo and description of her home. within a fe A very special, authenticated Aladdin home just hit the market in Takoma 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. If your house was built between 1908-1940, theres a chance it might be an original Sears house. 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. 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. We just can't say, because we can't access those records. 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. Lets find out! Some models were offered with variations, the most common of those being expanded floor plans and additional finished living spaces. 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. The ability to mass-produce the materials used in Sears homes reduced manufacturing costs, which allowed Sears to pass along the savings in lower prices for customers. Not all Sears houses became private residences. Prefab homes arent exactly an exotic concept nowadays. One of the most expensive models was the Magnolia, a 10-room Colonial-style house with. of the original Sears homes built from kits are still standing today. Sales peaked in 1929, just before the Great Depression. Construction of the houses took nine months which were completed in 1919. One of the biggest questions that researchers have been wanting to answer is: What is the Top-Selling Sears House of All Time? 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. More than 100 years of stories, product and brand histories, photographs, catalog images and more are now available online. 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. 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. 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. It looks almost like a Sears, And, finally, we have this pretty rare model, the Sears. Complete List of Sears Homes | Aurora, IL 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?). Several Sears Modern Homes are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. "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. [34], Like the Standard Addition in Carlinville, neighborhoods of Sears houses still hold a sense of identity and community. Sears Houses In the U.S. 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. muhammad ali i am the greatest speech transcript . Welcome to the New NSCAA. 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. national database of sears homes - speedpackages.com Run by experienced researcher Cindy Catanzaro (with a little help from yours truly). Modest half-timbering in the gables, exposed rafters, knee braces, and gable-end ridge finials combine to create an optimistic facade. 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. Sears Modern Homes Cities that have records of building permits may list Sears, Roebuck as the original architect. Local Sears house enthusiast Karen DeJeet, who owns a Hamilton model in Forest Hills and is a member of the Sears House Finder team, has already done much of the work identifying the mail-order homes still standing in the region. Here is one at 17 Hill Street, Villa Park. If home is where the heart is, then those living in houses built from Sears mail-order kits may have fallen head-over-heels. The last Sears Modern Homes catalog was issued in 1940. 199 models here in La Porte, are somewhat tweaked in their design, but we still do think that they are examples of that model. This Sears mail-order kit home in McCandless is owned by Normajean Moser. Owners of these houses along the years may have, however, found paper shipping labels affixed to the back of trim pieces around doors or windows, or decorative moulding pieces. The mortgage program was also a PR disaster, as many of the families Sears foreclosed upon refused to do further business with the company. The CNDDB is comprised of two data components: Text information and spatial information. 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. 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. 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. , in addition to Aladdin and Montgomery Ward 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. So this blog has been radio silent for a while now! sub 2:15 half marathon training plan; national database of sears homes. 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. If my house is not a kit, where did it come from? 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. 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. 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. To see a variety of models similar to the Mitchell, that were offered during the kit-house era, see this article. While I'm at it, I'll tell you a bit about our mission, as a research team. houses that share a name also share either a number, a floor plan or had Without complete sales records, we cannot say definitively that the Sears Argyle was the top seller. When the. Sometimes the legal description is nice and straightforward, like, "lot 15, block C, Tanglewood Estates, in the town of Dunham". Damn, it was like. 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. 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.. That's what happens Open to the public. 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. Historic house: Built in 1911, this Sears home sits on a large, corner lot in a historic district, surrounded by antebellum homes. [5] The method was originally named in the sense that the structure was light and could be lifted away like a balloon. I'm sure it was Matthew who cleared up for me that the No. If those were the top sellers, no model could catch the Argyle at that rate. However, many houses described as Sears Homes are not true Sears Homes, being either the product of another kit home manufacturer or not a kit home at all. 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. Because of the economics after 1931, I can say I am. And, to top it off, Gordon-Van Tine has a model almost the same. Despite being prefab, they got more character than the endless sea of suburban eyesores we got out there now. Despite this large number, Sears houses are still, actually, rare, and only make up about 2% of the houses built in their era. Simply put, life was rougher. Some Home Club homes have deeds from the "Port Newark Lumber and Material Company". 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. Fast forward to this past summer --early August of 2022. After several years, Sears also began assigning names to the various models. CNDDB Maps and Data - California Department of Fish and Wildlife houses that share a name also share either a number, a floor plan or had See that curled element at the hinge edge? [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. This is a complete list of Sears houses in Aurora (and two in Montgomery that were originally in Aurora). 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 . We have not surveyed all areas of the country equally. But what if you want something bigger than a tiny house, but not as gargantuan as the average American single family home? This is the case for the southern New Jersey counties that are suburbs of Philadelphia. But at the time, there was a housing boom taking place as people wanted to escape the crowds and disease of the cities. BMO Celebrates Kickoff of the 2023 Soccer Season at 'BMO Stadium' in Lara Solonickne, who writes the blog. 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. 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. 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. 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. People always seemed surprised to learn that Sears sold home kits. But what if you want something bigger than a tiny house, but not as gargantuan as the average American single family home? Sadly, surviving Argyles do tend to be heavily altered there are probably lots more hiding in plain sight. Click here. 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. Prefab homes arent exactly an exotic concept nowadays. They raised four kids in that house, Steel wrote. Another old model found predominantly in that Lakeview area, was the. That's why we love seeking them out! We have three on our list in Glenside -- one on Cedar, one on Tyson, and one on Edge Hill Rd. rebeccahunter1216@gmail.com. I believe my parents were the 3rd owners purchasing the house in 1965 or 1966. 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. Sears licensed the plans for the Argyle from a. real estate builder/developer named Jud Yoho. Thank you for visiting! On another block of W 11th Street, there is an example of the Sears Modern Home No. 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. The wild pursuit began with an a That year, the Aladdin Company of Bay City, Michigan, offered the first kit homes through mail order. Simply put, life was rougher. 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. within a fe A very special, authenticated Aladdin home just hit the market in Takoma 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. when you switch jobs, buy a house, and go on an international trip, all Its kind of exciting to learn that your home is unique because of the way it was bought and constructed, she said. Built around 1917 home resembles the Hazelton Model C2025,l 1915-1920 and the Vallonia Model P13049A or P13049B, 1927-1932. Chabot said while Sears wasnt the first or only company to sell mail-order homes, they were unique among the competition.

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