sears & The roe deer mail order catalog was nearly ubiquitous in early 20th century American life. in 1908, a fifth of Americans were subscribers. anyone anywhere in the country could order a free copy, review it, and then have anything they wanted delivered right to their door. At its peak, the Sears catalog offered more than 100,000 items on 1,400 pages. it weighed four pounds.
Today, those 1,400 pages give us a snapshot of American life in the first decade of the 20th century, from sheep-shearing machines and cream separators to telephones and china cabinets. the sears catalog tells the story of a world, detailed. And starting in 1908, the company that gave America everything began to offer what might be its boldest line of products: houses.
From 1908 to 1940, the sears modern home program offered complete homes by mail to prospective homeowners, what would be called “kit homes.” customers could select from dozens of different models in the sears modern home catalog, order plans, send in a check, and a few weeks later, everything they needed would arrive in a train car, the door secured with a small seal. red wax (just like the seal on the back of a letter).
This seal was to be broken on arrival by the new owner, who would open up their boxcar to find over 10,000 pieces of framing lumber, 20,000 cedar shakes, and almost everything else needed to build the home — all the doors, even the doorknobs.
The wood came pre-cut, like a giant ikea set, along with an instruction booklet. sears promised that, working without a carpenter and with only rudimentary skills, a person could finish their sears mail order home in less than 90 days.
sears would continue to ship some 75,000 houses nationwide. In doing so, they helped usher in the era of the custom-built home, replacing it with the promise that homes could be standardized and affordable. Long before the advent of modern housing developments and suburbia, it was the Sears Kit Home that gave Americans their first taste of 20th-century domestic life. but it is also a chapter in the history of housing that was almost lost.
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sears wasn’t the first company to offer kit homes or a mail order catalog, but it came to dominate the mail order market in part because its founder, richard sears, was the kind of expert many people would claim be one throughout the 20th century, but very few actually were: he was a marketing genius. For example, according to tradition, he intentionally made the Sears Roebuck catalog a bit shorter and narrower than Montgomery Ward’s on the theory that it would naturally stack on top.
In 1907, Sears and Roebuck were selling the then equivalent of $1.3 billion in merchandise to American families each year. And it was around this time that Richard Sears saw a way to sell even more.
Most American families at the time still lived in multi-generational housing. the reigning paradigm of the middle class was the Victorian house with all these different little rooms for different members of the family. sears looked at this idyllic scene of families living in harmony and saw…a missed opportunity. Why should newlyweds move into old houses filled with old stuff when they could move into new houses filled with new stuff from sears?
The resulting Sears Modern Home Program was a hit, particularly after the end of World War I, the influx of returning veterans triggered a need for more housing. Sears prefabricated almost all of these homes in giant mills situated across the country.
located in cairo, illinois, the largest of these mills covered nearly 40 acres, and the sheer variety of houses it shipped was staggering.
Its first catalog of modern houses already had more than 40 models to choose from, but sears would go on to offer 447 different designs.
each house in the catalog had a name according to their architectural aspirations. So if you’ve always dreamed of living in a California mission-style home, but couldn’t actually move to California, you might want to consider buying the Alhambra model from Sears. Other styles included the Vallonia, Martha Washington, and Crescent. they ranged from modest and cozy cabins to grand mansions. sears even offered a six-room schoolhouse, complete with an auditorium and library.
Of course, these were just empty houses when they were built, ready to be filled with stuff, ideally stuff from sears. the company could sell you everything you need: the house, the furniture, and all the things to put on the furniture: a whole new life, all from sears.
sears offered the promise of comfort on every level. It even had an ad in the front of the catalog showing two Rhodessa models, one of Sears’ most popular houses, being built side by side. one was built from scratch, essentially using ordinary building materials and uncut “stick” lumber. the other used precut lumber. The message was clear: it would be much easier to build with pre-cut parts from sears.
For many families, these were their first homes with things like insulation and central heating. In some neighborhoods, a Sears Kit home may be the only home on a block with electricity.
Then, in 1911, Sears began offering mortgages to their customers. Like everything else, they made these easy — maybe too easy. The Sears home mortgage program started out as one of their keys to success. In lowering the barrier to entry, it had allowed Sears to sell far more kit homes far faster than any of its competitors. But when the Great Depression hit, things got ugly fast. The company ended up foreclosing on tens of thousands of its very own customers. It was a public relations disaster.
After years of declining sales, Sears would finally close its modern homes department in 1940. A few other modular home manufacturers (who hadn’t sold mortgages) survived, but the Sears modular home boom was over. Then came World War II and with it the next modern housing boom, with the rise of suburbia and prefabs, the kind of houses we know today.
Meanwhile, most existing Sears homes ended up being sold to new owners who didn’t know what they’d bought, or didn’t care to know. Despite the high quality of the materials, over the decades, as the company became associated with convenience over and above quality, no one wanted to admit that they lived in a home that came from the Sears catalog. It was embarrassing. So a lot of them ended up being renovated beyond recognition. Many were torn down. Others were simply abandoned. And the records for those that remained were destroyed, making it hard to locate Sears homes today.
hunting house kit
A little over twenty years ago, on a cold winter’s day in Elgin, Illinois (a bit outside of Chicago), Rebecca Hunter grabbed an old Sears catalog and took it for a walk around the neighborhood, wondering if she could find a real-life house that matches the house designs from the book. she was not an architecture expert, nor was she an expert at sears. she was just curious.
elgin wasn’t known for its sears homes – when hunter moved to the area, it wasn’t really on his or anyone else’s radar. when he went out on his walk, he recalls that he “didn’t expect to find any.” it was just for fun, she says, but, “I had a goal. I had a mission and I forgot about the cold”. however, within minutes, he spotted his first home sears: a craftsman-style avalon that matched his catalog. as he walked further and further, he found more and more examples.
Hunter started taking notes about styles and locations, but she also wanted to verify her finds. So she began reaching out to residents, sending out mailers asking owners to inspect their homes for special beams bearing part numbers from Sears. Some also found shipping labels on the backs of baseboards or original Sears blueprints. So far, she and her fellow kit house hunters have found over 200 in Elgin.
surprisingly, too, most of the sears houses hunter found looked like they came straight out of the catalogue. They had barely been disturbed since the 1920s. He was able to find so many not because Elgin had the most Sears homes, but because the homes were still recognizable, thanks to a perfect storm of historic conditions.
When the Elgin watch factory, which had employed a quarter of the city, closed in 1964, Elgin entered a localized recession, saving it from the renovation craze of the 1960s and 1970s. , the elgin sears houses simply sat there for decades, largely intact. the closure of the watch factory froze the town in time.
Hunter’s study of the Elgin homes, along with the work of other researchers, would help to launch fresh interest in historic kit homes, not just there but also around the country. Today, a crew of kit home hunters has self-styled specialists who organize databases, search Google maps, and photograph historic homes. Mostly, though, they hunt for houses the old-fashioned way, by meeting up in groups of two and three and four and cruising slowly down the streets of obscure midwest towns, in a car, together.
These and other home finders have helped identify nearly 50,000 kit homes from sears and other companies. So the next time a ragtag team of investigators armed with cameras, laptops, and an old Sears catalog knocks on your door and asks if they can take a quick tour of your basement, don’t panic. they are there to help. and who knows? it might even be standing on a model not yet discovered.
correction: sears, roebuck & co. the catalog referenced in the episode is catalog number 117 from the great price maker.
