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. I think that one of our researchers, Lara Solonickne. I think that we had only a handful of houses already on the list a few. Sears' first kit houses sold for $650 to $2,500, or approximately $16,500 to $63,700 in today's dollars. Your comment will appear after it has been previewed and approved by the blog author. to share their names with others who might be interested in Many of the smaller models are regularly torn down. This picture came from an original set of Sears "Honor Bilt" blueprints. [14], In addition to houses, the 1908 Sears catalog offered a kit schoolhouse with the model name "Schoolhouse No. [17] Later on in the Modern Homes timeline, Sears had in-office designers but titled them as "experts" rather than actual architects.[17]. In some cases, Sears provided construction services to assemble the homes. House was moved to Carbondale, CO in about 1972, Still trying to find more info.. Marie's great-grandfather, Freeman Pretzinger, built this Sears. Many of these homes were built in Sears planned "Home Club Plan" developments in New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.[9][10][11]. 920 North Madison Avenue, Anderson, Indiana Asking: $379,900 Sears Roebuck Model: Elmhurst Year Built: 1932 Listing Agent: Julie Armington Listing Brokerage: F.C. However, the streets that are lined with these farmhouse models (and many other houses), are actually in the Lakeview neighborhood so, we imagine that was a mistake in the article. 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. 1227 Disston St, Oxford Circle neighborhood of Philadelphia. Ephemera can help identify a house as a Sears 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. homes for rent in laplace 70068. national database of sears homes. 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. 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. Thanks for your interest! 159 examples that have a closed pediment in the gable (and a porch style difference). A Gilded Mansion in Newport Beach, CA (Unreal), Fallen Titan that is Sears department stores. That's what happens In areas where the land is already mostly developed and zoned, its not that simple. I now live in St. Louis, Missouri, and am sometimes asked if there are any Sears houses here. Another old model found predominantly in that Lakeview area, was the. Open to the public. 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 many cases, we may be able to tell you of homes in your town, that have actually been authenticated as Sears homes, and, in some cases, we may be able to tell you that the house in question is a kit house from another company (consider, , All photos in these blog posts are the property of the author of this blog- link to this blog. *Sears Americus - Temple, PA*It's been about 3 months since the last update Rebecca lives in Elgin, Illinois, and undertook a huge research project, to find, and document, kit houses in that town. 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. Cities that have records of building permits may list Sears, Roebuck as the original architect. Fast forward to this past summer --early August of 2022. Sears Modern Homes are something we totally need to bring back from the past for this. 306 Highland, Madison, WI. 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. Ive visited New Orleans several times and love the style of the buildings there. 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. 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. This is the case for the southern New Jersey counties that are suburbs of Philadelphia. 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. 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. within a fe A very special, authenticated Aladdin home just hit the market in Takoma 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. Theres a whole checklist of signs to look for, 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. The house forms part of the farmstead at the museum.[40]. 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. 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. Jud Yoho may also have been the designer behind the popular Sears model called the Hollywood. This phrase is trademarked and cannot be used without permission of Ricky Bobby, Inc. Click to visit. 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. 3 in U.S. with, at todays count, 1,963 Sears homes found.. Looking at the sorry state of Americas rail infrastructure today, this also makes me weep although today theyd just be delivered via truck. This was the case with most of the compact pre-1920 Sears houses. I grew up in a Sears house located in Keyport NJ. Here is one at 17 Hill Street, Villa Park. I love finding these houses and learning more about them, the different models that were sold and the people who bought them.. Carrying on with Same Name, Different House topic we find that some of the As some areas begin to see population booms, such as the tech triangle region of Raleigh, Durham, and Cary as more companies and tech talent make exodus from California and New York based on what I hear from taxi drivers and my university contacts in the region at games conferences every year? [7] Early mortgage loans were typically for 5 to 15 years at 6% to 7% interest. 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. Some of the models are easier to identify visually and their counts may be disproportionately high. 181, Sears No. Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois in particular are your best bet for finding Sears homes although Newark, New Jersey apparently still has a couple. Please contact me if you would like a free Camden County would be a great place to search, because we know that there are Sears houses in Collingswood, Haddon Township, Haddonfield, and Haddon Heights but, how many? 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. When we find a mortgage record, we're just given a buyer's name, and a legal description of a property. Photo from Realtor site. One of the things that Marie has done for us, is to perfectly describe our search for Sears houses, as a "badass hobby" that is akin to a "huge historical treasure hunt". But David Betcone told us what model was in first place as of 1931. Sears Magnolia was also known as Model #2089. After several years, Sears also began assigning names to the various models. She said she didnt know the house was built from a kit ordered from a catalog until after she bought it. 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. Lara Solonickne, who writes the blog. I learn all kinds of interesting stuff here; thanks! The mortgage program was also a PR disaster, as many of the families Sears foreclosed upon refused to do further business with the company. Dover, Chateau, and Lexington models are particularly plentiful there! By Posted on Mar 10, 2021. national database of sears homes. 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. 1232 / No. of "Where are the Sears Houses?" BMO, LAFC, and Angel City FC leaders were joined by special guests Earvin "Magic" Johnson and Mia Hamm for the . 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. 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! 159, except for a closed pediment up in the front and side gable. 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. 3 in U.S. with, at today's count, 1,963 Sears homes. And Sears Modern Homes werent a monolith. I saw a recent article in The Star Ledger about Sears Homes that mentioned your blog. Its not like nowadays where you move, wait for your stuff to arrive, and if youre a work-at-home like me, youre pretty much unable to work while you wait for a technician to ensure you have Internet access. Molly Harbst of Munhall sent along photos of her beautifully preserved Sears homes a 1920 model called The Crescent after reading the article. Harbst said it wasnt until after she bought the house that she learned homes were once sold through mail-order catalogs. [16], There was no single architect for the Sears designs. From that, we have to try to connect all of that to an existing street address. Browse the list below to see if there are Modern Homes in your 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. 162 Sears houses still standing, including those in the city of Alexandria. 110 (, 1524 2nd Street, La Porte, Indiana earliest version of the Sears No. national database of sears homes. I have the Farnum in New Brighton PA. 1929. The multi-million-dollar home has been red-tagged while two other Originally marketed as the. [2] No comprehensive list of their locations exists.[3]. Square . [1] Sears Modern Homes were purchased primarily by customers in East Coast and Midwest states, but have been located as far south as Florida, as far west as California, and as far north as Alaska and Canada. The most popular models appeared in the catalog for multiple years. Ha! 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. excited about this find and I really hope it is one: a Sears No. 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. The rest of these models are singletons, from the mid 1920s to early 1930s. 1916 Sears Roebuck Modern Homes. Thats cheaper than many tiny houses and with space to actually breathe and have more than one person live with you without wanting to kill each other. That's why we love seeking them out! Chabot said while Sears wasnt the first or only company to sell mail-order homes, they were unique among the competition. 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. Normajean Moser of McCandless owns a Walton model that was purchased from the Sears Modern Home catalog. Some models were offered with variations, the most common of those being expanded floor plans and additional finished living spaces. The houses, comprising eight models, were all built in a 12-block area known as the Standard Addition. So, each house that we find through these records, represents a great deal of digging, and lots of amassed knowledge in how to attack the task because each county's records system is a little different than others. [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. Thank you for visiting! Because of the economics after 1931, I can say I am. Like this page to learn about homes purchased as kits through mail order catalogs. Many of the homes original features remain intact. The suburbs of Philadelphia are not the only places where we find Sears houses, by the way. Other times, the legal description refers to a house being on "a road leading from York to Millville", and maybe the lot bordering "the land of Joseph Craws" usually, that road, if we can figure out which one it is, is miles and miles long, and there's no way to find "the land of Joseph Craws", so that's of no help at all. In 1916, Sears began shipping pre-cut lumber in its mail-order kit homes that contained stamped numbers used to match pieces during construction. Open to the public. 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. If those were the top sellers, no model could catch the Argyle at that rate. The first mail order for a Sears house was filled that year. 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. Stamped lumber: Most easily found in unfinished spaces like a basement or attic, framing members were stamped with a letter and a number. 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. 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. Click on any of the linked house listings to view a picture . However, these stamps were not used on lumber shipped before 1916, when Sears first started offering pre-cut lumber. According to Betcone, the two models that were the top sellers for Sears in 1930 totaled just over 100 houses a year. 2) Look for shipping labels. To see a variety of models similar to the Mitchell, that were offered during the kit-house era, see this article. In fact, the No. Related: Floating Chairs and Texas McMansions | McMansions vs Really Big Houses | Strange Mansion in Carmel, Indiana | What is a Mansion. Today, those marks can help prove that you have a kit home. It's highly improbable that any model could hit the 1,700 mark. Parts for the homes, which were sold between 1908 and 1940, were delivered to the nearest rail station. That year, the Aladdin Company of Bay City, Michigan, offered the first kit homes through mail order. 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". Melissa Steel of Patterson Heights in Beaver County said the story about the Sears house in McCandless sparked fond memories of the family next door who lived in one for many years. 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.
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