Where Are The Rest Of The Sears Houses In The U.S.? 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. The American Lumberman article referred to this area where the houses were being built, as the Fairview neighborhood. 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. Thank you for visiting! presentation, nows your chance! So, I'll just post a nice selection here. They kept up with it, of course, but it sure has good bones. Were most Sears Houses built by the owners? Measuring in at a roomy 3,500 square feet, the . 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. Wonderful, Malissa! 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. 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. hennessy privilege limited edition / what is mc hammer doing now 2020 / national database of sears homes. I thought it was very interesting when I learned that you could also buy a house from their catalogs.. sub 2:15 half marathon training plan; national database of sears homes. 1916 Sears Roebuck Modern Homes. I see you posted about the origins of Hollywood three years ago! The rest of these models are singletons, from the mid 1920s to early 1930s. Many of the smaller models are regularly torn down. , 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. Several Sears Modern Homes are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And Sears Modern Homes werent a monolith. 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. 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. 172, later marketed as the. 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. In it, they included excerpts from an interview with David S. Betcone, who was the chief architect for Sears at the time. 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. By Posted on Mar 10, 2021. national database of sears homes. Sears Modern Homes were catalog and kit houses sold primarily through mail order by Sears, Roebuck and Co., an American retailer. A Gilded Mansion in Newport Beach, CA (Unreal), Fallen Titan that is Sears department stores. The multi-million-dollar home has been red-tagged while two other 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. 06/16/2022 . You'll also notice that the No. 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 discontinued its Modern Homes catalog after 1940, though sales through local sales offices continued into 1942. She said she also didnt know it was a mail-order house when she bought it 14 years ago. The first mail order for a Sears house was filled that year. While financing through Sears helped many homeowners purchase homes, many of those purchasers defaulted during the ensuing Great Depression. We are a team of about 10 researchers who work together to hunt around the U.S. for Sears kit houses built during the era of the Sears Modern Homes program (1908-1942). , in addition to Aladdin and Montgomery Ward homes. | 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.? Whitehouse. 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. However, these stamps were not used on lumber shipped before 1916, when Sears first started offering pre-cut lumber. Sears is estimated to have sold about 70,000 of their home building kits from 1908-1940 and its currently estimated that. How did Sears Modern Homes come to be? You can contact Tony by email at tlarussa@triblive.com or via Twitter . Photo from Realtor site. So this blog has been radio silent for a while now! Tony LaRussa is a Tribune-Review staff writer. 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. 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. Sold for 12 years and discontinued in 1928. 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. As its mail-order catalogs were already sent to millions of homes, Sears had a distinct advantage over other kit-home competitors. 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. houses that share a name also share either a number, a floor plan or had Also, homes in southern Ohio may have financing documents through the "Norwood Sash and Door Company" of Norwood, Ohio. 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?). From that, we have to try to connect all of that to an existing street address. TribLIVE's Daily and Weekly email newsletters deliver the news you want and information you need, right to your inbox. 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. In 1906, Frank W. Kushel, a Sears manager, was given responsibility for the catalog company's unwieldy, unprofitable building-materials department. [35] Another homeowner, Erskine Hogue Stanberry, states that his Saratoga model was the "first house in Chelsea to have electric lights" and that they "are using the original plumbing and wiring".[35]. When we find a mortgage record, we're just given a buyer's name, and a legal description of a property. There were about 132 million people by the time Sears stopped selling Sears Modern Homes kits in 1940. If you have any authenticating source for us, we'd love to hear about it (you can email me directly at SearsHouseSeeker@gmail.com). That's what happens excited about this find and I really hope it is one: a Sears No. Sears licensed the plans for the Argyle from a. real estate builder/developer named Jud Yoho. 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. This system used precut timber of mostly standard sizes (2"x4" and 2"x8") for framing. Other companies such as Aladdin sold mail-order homes, but thats all they sold, Chabot said. Photo from Realtor site. Here are a few: Andrew just today noticed this brick house with the Sears curlicue decorative iron strapping (only offered by Sears, and the only style of iron strapping ever offered by Sears). when you switch jobs, buy a house, and go on an international trip, all 171 examples in La Porte. Price: $179,900. Precut lumber was cut to the appropriate lengths and angles based on where the framing timber would be used in the house. Text information is available through RareFind 5 and provides essential information about special status species and occurrences. 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. 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. Thank you for visiting! This was the case with most of the compact pre-1920 Sears houses. Sears' first kit houses sold for $650 to $2,500, or approximately $16,500 to $63,700 in today's dollars. 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. It looks almost like a Sears, And, finally, we have this pretty rare model, the Sears. Please contact me if you would like a free Some models of Sears homes were very similar in design to models offered by other kit home manufacturers or through plan books. national database of sears homes. 1227 Disston St, Oxford Circle neighborhood of Philadelphia. There were less people, but quality housing that could get built easily was a must for the quickly-growing population as World War I veterans came home and started families, and an immigration boom was taking place. 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. In areas where the land is already mostly developed and zoned, its not that simple. , something that piqued my interest was the idea that you could buy literal houses from the catalog. 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. . I was intrigued by the concept of people picking out a house from a catalog, she said. It wasnt until she was in her 20s that Chabot learned about the homes history. 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. The Preservation Commission has identified a majority of the styles, but since many are modified it can be hard to tell. House was moved to Carbondale, CO in about 1972, Still trying to find more info.. 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. small-town America, 1920! Sears began offering financing plans around 1912. 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. New models were introduced every year, and some only stuck around for a couple years. [2] No comprehensive list of their locations exists.[3]. By the time of the 1914 catalog, the model had been tweaked, to add the peak gable, closed pediment pop-up dormer over the upper bay windows. But what if you want something bigger than a tiny house, but not as gargantuan as the average American single family home? Some of the models are easier to identify visually and their counts may be disproportionately high. HBM (. So, Can We See Some Philly Suburbs Sears Houses? A kick-off celebration was held March 3, 2023, for the newly renamed BMO Stadium. 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 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. And Sears Modern Homes werent a monolith. But at the time, there was a housing boom taking place as people wanted to escape the crowds and disease of the cities. 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".