national database of sears homes

", "Bill of Materials for Sears Modern Home", "Two Italian Families and their Neighboring Sears Houses", "New Homes in Cranford for $4,000!Biggest development evolved in Sunny Acres", "Yes, Virginia, Sears Homes Were Built After 1940", "The Top Four Most Popular Sears Homes--Have You Seen These? So Betcone gave us a huge clue as to what the top seller for Sears was. 324 W Johnson Road Sears Jewel, Jewell, or Wilmore (depends on the year). During the Modern Homes program, large quantities of asphalt shingles became available. They had 447 different styles that ranged from simple and rustic to utterly decadent. 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. New York state is 4th, with 1,679 houses found. So, Can We See Some Philly Suburbs Sears Houses? 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. , in addition to Aladdin and Montgomery Ward homes. 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. Documented Sears houses have been found across the United States and in a few locations in Canada. This picture came from an original set of Sears "Honor Bilt" blueprints. Cindy's research in Delaware County, coupled with my research in Montgomery County, netted at least 200 hundred authenticated houses, but that research was preceded by many hours of searching the streets of Willow Grove, Glenside, and other suburbs, by Karen, Nigel, Sarah, Marie, and Andrew. From 1931-1942 Sears sold about 5,000 houses altogether. Sears Modern Homes Lara Solonickne, who writes the blog. 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. the case of the Anstett family of Torrington, Connecticut. She searched the Sears Home archive until she found a catalog with a photo and description of her home. 181, Sears No. To drum up business, Sears issued a press release to newspapers across the United States. contacting them by clicking on their name. Carrying on with Same Name, Different House topic we find that some of the 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. One Magnolia built in Lincoln, Nebraska, was demolished in 1985. True to the companys roots in selling to rural Midwesterners, they even had a catalog for farmhouses, barns, and other barn buildings. Or, perhaps we have background information about it to share with you!Judith. Modern Home 264B110 - Farmhouse style - 1916 Sears House Plans 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. 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. Built around 1917 home resembles the Hazelton Model C2025,l 1915-1920 and the Vallonia Model P13049A or P13049B, 1927-1932. Researching Historic Kit and Plan Book Homes, We started looking around La Porte, Indiana, in 2015. We love her for giving us this to quote over and over again and for the many Sears houses that she has added to our list. national database of sears homes. 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. This is what these two models look like, in the catalogs (these are from the 1911/1912 catalog): Up until this point, we weren't really sure what the difference was between these two models. website, which was published from Oct 2013 to Nov 2014. They kept up with it, of course, but it sure has good bones. This is a complete list of Sears houses in Aurora (and two in Montgomery that were originally in Aurora). Lets find out! She said she also didnt know it was a mail-order house when she bought it 14 years ago. The Rossville/No. Kmart History | Search Archives | Sears Holdings Alumni | sears.com | kmart.com : Thursday, Mar. Determining which company manufactured a particular catalog and kit home may require additional research to determine the origin of that home. Sears Houses In the U.S. Please contact me if you would like a free 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". [7] Early mortgage loans were typically for 5 to 15 years at 6% to 7% interest. 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. While I'm at it, I'll tell you a bit about our mission, as a research team. However, in La Porte, we've also found five examples* of houses that look like a great match for the No. Los Angeles Modern Stilt Home Featured in Heat (Listed for $1.599 Million), International House Flipper Alex Camacho Makes $80k Profit on One House Flip, Bugsy Siegel Murder Mansion in Beverly Hills Flats (Listed for $17 Million), Zsa Zsa Gabors Pink Palm Springs Palace (Listed for $3.8 Million), 35 Kitchen Breakfast Bars The Latest In Casual Kitchen Dining. Homes built after 1916 can be identified as Sears kit homes by numbers stamped on the timbers. Goodwall sheet plaster was an early drywall-like product offered by Sears and may be an indication of a Sears Modern Home. Despite this large number, Sears houses are still, actually, rare, and only make up about 2% of the houses built in their era. My home reminds me of that type of architecture.. There was one snippet in the press release that only a couple newspapers reprinted: "Following twelve years of usefulness, one old design was removed from the home catalogue in 1928, as antiquated after having been constructed more than 1700 times, which probably constitutes the world's record for any construction duplication from a single house plan, he [Betcone] says.". In a second blog post, I'll show the several probable kit houses that we've found in LaPorte, Indiana, from other companies. Sears provided "capital and materials", on the condition that lots and foundations were already in place. Thank you for visiting! , there were about 88.7 million people living in the United States. 1227 Disston St, Oxford Circle neighborhood of Philadelphia. Sears mail-order homes prove plentiful in Western Pennsylvania But what if you want something bigger than a tiny house, but not as gargantuan as the average American single family home? Welcome to the New NSCAA. Argyles also tend to get messed up and hard to recognize like this one at 6818 N. Oriole, Chicago or this one at 1302 Edgewood, Lake Forest. ", "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. 168/Matoka, 301 Weller Avenue, La Porte, Indiana probable Sears Modern Home No. Michigan, Indiana, and New Jersey have large overall numbers, as well. Parts for the homes, which were sold between 1908 and 1940, were delivered to the nearest rail station. 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. 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". Our list, by the way, began in the early years of our research group. [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. national database of sears homes - onehundredeggs.com Precut lumber was cut to the appropriate lengths and angles based on where the framing timber would be used in the house. 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, Sears Wasnt an Innovator, but They Knew Quality and Efficiency. Researchers Cindy Catanzaro and Andrew Mutch, and the late Donna Bakke, put together a document explaining Bea's work, and listing 345 of the houses that she found, which you can see. Some models were offered in both wood siding and brick veneer versions with different names attributed to the same or almost identical home plan. 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! [2] No comprehensive list of their locations exists.[3]. No built examples have been found of some of the least popular models. Posted by ; fort lincoln cemetery obituaries; , something that piqued my interest was the idea that you could buy literal houses from the catalog. 4120 Adams St., Gary, IN. 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. According to the catalog image, both models have only a partial porch at the front of the house. Marie gives the perfect explanation of our Sears House hunt, in this. Here is one of the eleven examples in La Porte: This early version of the No. Authorities shoot, wound carjacking suspect who fired at officers Newport Beach home dangling on edge after cliff collapses Balloon frames could be built faster and generally only required one carpenter. sub 2:15 half marathon training plan; national database of sears homes. This product offered the advantages of low price, ease of installation, and added fire protection. Marie's great-grandfather, Freeman Pretzinger, built this Sears. 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. Sears Houses in Elgin, Illinois (Rebecca L. Hunter), BOOK:Houses By Mail -- published by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, BOOK: History and Field Guide to Wardway Homes, Rosemary Thornton's Sears Modern Homes website (use to search for models), Beatrice Lask Thesis: Summary list (Cincinnati Sears Homes). Either way, these houses offered variety and quality even if they werent necessarily innovative. If my house is not a kit, where did it come from? You'll also notice that the No. . 172/ Hazelton, at 810 W 11th Street, La Porte, Indiana. Here are both of these models in the 1911/12 Sears Modern Homes catalog. 159 examples that have a closed pediment in the gable (and a porch style difference). 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. 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. 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. I see you posted about the origins of Hollywood three years ago! 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. 02, 2023 : History: Catalogs: Homes: Products: Brands: Stores: People Historic Homes : . In areas where the land is already mostly developed and zoned, its not that simple. Sears' first kit houses sold for $650 to $2,500, or approximately $16,500 to $63,700 in today's dollars. The house was in original condition and was never modified while we lived there - it was sold in 2003 or early 2004. 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. | 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.? Ruth's Beauty Parlor: A Sears No. 1. Had the. Not all Sears houses were mortgaged through Sears, but many were, so it's a great help for us to be able to access those records. So, I'll just post a nice selection here. The builder was W.L. 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. Home - National Housing Preservation Database (NHPD) You can contact Rose through her Facebook group, "Sears Kit Homes" or email: Magnolia2047@gmail.com. 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. Before 1916, the home builder had to cut their Sears-supplied lumber to appropriate lengths. 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. The Greenview/No. national database of sears homes - dowdcreative.com Dover, Chateau, and Lexington models are particularly plentiful there! Tasty Soft Garlic and Herb Bread Sticks Recipe How to Make it in 23 Simple Steps, Villa Faberge! Here is the catalog image, from the 1911/12 catalog: And here are two examples in La Porte. national database of sears homes - speedpackages.com city or state, or to find someone who owns the same model as you. . Photo from Realtor site. by . Welcome to Sears Homes! I have seen articles throughout the years about Sears homes in the Pittsburgh area, she wrote after reading the Trib story. Did materials and labor really get that much more expensive between now and then? Images are available [4] Other homeowners relied on local carpenters or contractors to assemble the houses. 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. Sears mail-order house kits can often be identified by the shipping labels that were placed on the backside of trim. 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. 1232 click. Modest half-timbering in the gables, exposed rafters, knee braces, and gable-end ridge finials combine to create an optimistic facade. 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?). So, they are likely from Sears. 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. Rockstar, Consistent Trees, and Baryon Mass data from the Generation 3 and Generation 6 VELA Simulations. Shipping label image from my mother's family's 1911 Sears No. The kit was greatly modified by Lane's ambitious designs. 1232, later marketed as the No. Tony LaRussa is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Sears houses could also be ordered with reversed floor plans. Here is one at 17 Hill Street, Villa Park. 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). I saw a recent article in The Star Ledger about Sears Homes that mentioned your blog. Some of these homes were based on models offered in the Sears Modern Homes catalog. Honor Bilt homes used the best quality materials that Sears could source and they were designed with what was then state of the art heating, plumbing, and electricity. It even halted sales of houses themselves for a short time before restarting sales. 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. Depending on where you live, the thought of just building a small or medium sized house can sound totally bizarre or perhaps totally doable if youve got miles and miles of wide open space to work with. Fast forward to this past summer --early August of 2022. 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 cannot be absolutely certain, but the numbers do not support it. In 1916, Sears began shipping pre-cut lumber in its mail-order kit homes that contained stamped numbers used to match pieces during construction. 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. 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. Because lets get real: those adorable and affordable ranchers were only for CERTAIN veterans and their families. 181 (264P181) in the 1914 Sears Modern Homes catalog, This image is from the 1913 Sears Modern Homes catalog re-print, available, 374 Hawthorne Street, La Porte, Indiana Sears Modern Home No. How Many Sears Houses Are Still Out There? But the houses don't match any of the designs that Sears sold in their catalogs. Without authentication, however, we can't be 100% certain that this house was ordered from Sears, as numerous kit and non-kit companies offered a very similar model, and these kinds of stories that are passed down over time, often turn out to be mistaken (with the house actually being a model from a different kit company, or simply resembling a model offered by Sears). ), or streets that have houses with no designated house number (yes, again! The search for Sears Roebuck houses nationwide was launched in the mid-1970's when the, This was a case of unfortunate timing. It is unknown whether any were purchased or built. Sold for 12 years and discontinued in 1928. It looks almost like a Sears, And, finally, we have this pretty rare model, the Sears. 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. This is the case for the southern New Jersey counties that are suburbs of Philadelphia. Local building requirements sometimes dictated that certain elements of the house construction be done professionally and varied depending on where the house was constructed. national database of sears homes - thenscaa.com I'm currently working my way through the Burlington County records, but they are limited, and set up in a way that makes the process very time consuming. Were most Sears Houses built by the owners? Sure, your Wabash or Verona model 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. Later, Sears constructed a second mill in Port Newark, New Jersey and purchased the Norwood Sash and Door Company in Norwood, Ohio. Measuring in at a roomy 3,500 square feet, the . They raised four kids in that house, Steel wrote. Between 1908 and 1940, Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold nearly 75,000 kit homes through its Modern Homes program, which featured 447 styles of houses, ranging from large multistory dwellings to tiny summer cottages with an optional outhouse. All these years later it is still a fortress.. Sears Modern Homes offered more than 370 designs in a wide range of architectural styles and sizes over the line's 34-year history. 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. This site is a tribute to the original Sears Houses in Cincinnati hennessy privilege limited edition / what is mc hammer doing now 2020 / national database of sears homes. You can search the house listings by clicking on a group of years ( 1908-1914 , 1915-1920 , 1921-1926 , 1927-1932 and 1933-1940 ). national database of sears homes. Thank you for visiting! And, to top it off, Gordon-Van Tine has a model almost the same. 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. This phrase is trademarked and cannot be used without permission of Ricky Bobby, Inc. 181, and the early version of the. Thanks for your interest! 199 (the predecessor to the Sears, We've put eleven houses on our list that we are pretty confident are the early version of the. Whitehouse. Data Portal - NASA If your house was built between 1908-1940, theres a chance it might be an original Sears house. This means that information about the Modern Homes department is scarce. Here is the Uriel or Conway at 408 Bond Street. Teen hikers rescued after days stuck in California snowstorm Without complete sales records, we cannot say definitively that the Sears Argyle was the top seller. R.L. Hunter Press: Mail Order House Research The house that would soon become the Argyle in one of Yoho's magazines, 1913. 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. As its mail-order catalogs were already sent to millions of homes, Sears had a distinct advantage over other kit-home competitors. However, these stamps were not used on lumber shipped before 1916, when Sears first started offering pre-cut lumber. Researching Historic Kit and Plan Book Homes. 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. Click to visit. to you on Flickr or Pinterest. This site is a tribute to the original Sears Houses in Cincinnati 126 and a Sears No. 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. Sears Modern Homes are something we totally need to bring back from the past for this. None of these houses are authenticated through mortgage or deed research, but they are spot-on matches for the models, and we feel certain enough of their origin, to add them to our database. And Sears Modern Homes werent a monolith. small-town America, 1920! So this blog has been radio silent for a while now! In 1906, Frank W. Kushel, a Sears manager, was given responsibility for the catalog company's unwieldy, unprofitable building-materials department. Chabot focuses her research on scouring mortgages and deed records, old newspaper articles and other sources to identify kit homes sold by Sears. Or did we just go wrong somewhere when someone decided the house you live in should be treated like a bank?

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