national database of sears homes
Sears licensed the plans for the Argyle from a. real estate builder/developer named Jud Yoho. 126 and a Sears No. rebeccahunter1216@gmail.com. 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. Its as sturdy as a house as Ive ever seen. 4120 Adams St., Gary, IN. We have just over 200 Sears houses on our list, that came from Rebecca's research project in Elgin (it also included kit houses from other companies, that she was able to identify -- we've added those to our lists for those companies, as well). The Sears Argyle was a small house, about 1,000 square feet, and many of them have been demolished. Authorities shoot, wound carjacking suspect who fired at officers 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. This Sears mail-order house named The Crescent was built in Munhall in 1920, according to owner Molly Harbst. Original paperwork for the house including blueprints and letters of correspondence from Sears. Powered by, This September 2017 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, this short video story by the Washington Post. 3 in U.S. with, at todays count, 1,963 Sears homes found.. [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. I know of several other models in McCandless. It's also possible that some local builder just put together a similar design, to compete with the Sears houses being built in town, but, some of these examples are on blocks of streets that are lined with Sears houses from this early spec offering by Sears. You can contact Rose through her Facebook group, "Sears Kit Homes" or email: Magnolia2047@gmail.com. The houses made it as far as Alaska and Canada, as the parts were delivered by railroad. "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. One of the biggest questions that researchers have been wanting to answer is: What is the Top-Selling Sears House of All Time? "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. Sears mail-order house kits can often be identified by the shipping labels that were placed on the backside of trim. 171 often has a full front porch that ends up extending all the way to the left side of the house. 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. Our list, by the way, began in the early years of our research group. Sears Modern Homes were sold between 1908 and 1942. They kept up with it, of course, but it sure has good bones. Ruth's Beauty Parlor: A Sears No. The Top-Selling Sears Kit House - Sears Homes Other models only appeared for one year. There were about 132 million people by the time Sears stopped selling Sears Modern Homes kits in 1940. Open to the public. A Newport Beach home remains dangerously close to tumbling down a cliffside after the ground underneath gave way on Friday morning. of "Where are the Sears Houses?" This label was discovered in a Sears Silverdale model home built in 1911 in Northhampton, Mass., by Judith Chabots grandparents. Several Sears Modern Homes are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This picture came from an original set of Sears "Honor Bilt" blueprints. You usually just left with the clothes on your back and a few trunks, and that was it. But the houses don't match any of the designs that Sears sold in their catalogs. If my house is not a kit, where did it come from? website, which was published from Oct 2013 to Nov 2014. when you switch jobs, buy a house, and go on an international trip, all Tasty Soft Garlic and Herb Bread Sticks Recipe How to Make it in 23 Simple Steps, Villa Faberge! The houses, comprising eight models, were all built in a 12-block area known as the Standard Addition. Whatever Happened to Those Mail-Order Houses From the Sears Catalog? 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. If you don't know what that means, look at these two examples, and note where the orange arrow points that little extra strip of roofing that makes a sort of closed triangle. Sears House Seeker My home reminds me of that type of architecture.. Would you mind messaging me with an address, so that we can add your Sears house to our (private) national database? Modern Home 264B110 - Farmhouse style - 1916 Sears House Plans 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 . In some cases, Sears provided construction services to assemble the homes. In a second blog post, I'll show the several probable kit houses that we've found in LaPorte, Indiana, from other companies. For more information on who we are, and what we do, visit our website: All photos in these blog posts are the property of the author of this blog- link to this blog. 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. contacting them by clicking on their name. Ohio and Illinois are still leading, though, with 2700+ and 2300+, respectively. Run by experienced researcher Cindy Catanzaro (with a little help from yours truly). You can see that La Porte, Indiana is mentioned as one of the "built at" locations: We found four examples of what we believe to be the model No. Harbst said it wasnt until after she bought the house that she learned homes were once sold through mail-order catalogs. , something that piqued my interest was the idea that you could buy literal houses from the catalog. Teen hikers rescued after days stuck in California snowstorm 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. national database of sears homes - onehundredeggs.com Some of these homes were based on models offered in the Sears Modern Homes catalog. The company was forced to liquidate $11 million in defaulted debt. So, Can We See Some Philly Suburbs Sears Houses? Compare house designs to original catalog images. 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. So this blog has been radio silent for a while now! In their own way, houses with Craftsman-style design elements often managed their own form of ebullient excess such as Modern Home No. 7 Charming Sears Catalog Homes You Can Buy Today 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. Statewide, about 1,900 Sears catalog homes have been identified. However, in La Porte, we've also found five examples* of houses that look like a great match for the No. Click to visit. Sears houses can be identified or authenticated using the following methods. presentation, nows your chance! Researching Historic Kit and Plan Book Homes, We started looking around La Porte, Indiana, in 2015. We just love the Walton model! Homes built after 1916 can be identified as Sears kit homes by numbers stamped on the timbers. That year, the Aladdin Company of Bay City, Michigan, offered the first kit homes through mail order. 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). 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. Welcome to Sears Homes! Tony LaRussa is a Tribune-Review staff writer. The wild pursuit began with an a Her parents did not care much for the house and eventually moved back into their original farmhouse. Weve got so much fucking housing just sitting there that NO ONE should be condemned to homelessness. Capture from Google Streetview. 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. For this week's listing of the week, we decided to find seven charming Sears Catalog homes you can actually buy today. 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. Those kinds of topics are cleared up, in this blog post: When I chatted with Kevin Riordan, I also sent him a list of several nice Sears houses that he could consider photographing for his article in the Philadelphia Inquirer. 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. . Precut framing timbers, an innovation pioneered by Aladdin, were first offered by Sears in 1916. The Sears Argyle was a small house, about 1,000 square feet, and many of them have been demolished. 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. CNDDB Maps and Data - California Department of Fish and Wildlife 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. Balloon frames could be built faster and generally only required one carpenter. At Greenlawn Cemetery, near the Hampton Roads waterfront in the Newport News, Virginia, area, the cemetery office building is a 1936 Sears Modern Home. Without complete sales records, we cannot say definitively that the Sears Argyle was the top seller. 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. Posted by ; fort lincoln cemetery obituaries; We cannot be absolutely certain, but the numbers do not support it. 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. If your house was built between 1908-1940, theres a chance it might be an original Sears house. Photo from Realtor site. 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! 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. sub 2:15 half marathon training plan; national database of sears homes. However, as you can see in the photos above, that showed the sides of the house, the Rossville/No. Here is a year-by-year list of houses as they were advertised in the Sears Modern Homes catalogs. that was $886 in 1940 dollars, about $16,000 today. Prefab homes arent exactly an exotic concept nowadays. Sears' first kit houses sold for $650 to $2,500, or approximately $16,500 to $63,700 in today's dollars. 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 House that Came in the Mail - 99% Invisible 1232 / No. What was up with this particular model of home building, and are there any original Sears houses left? I considered putting a full chart here, but, honestly, we have found hundreds through searching the suburban PA counties outside of Philadelphia. Despite being prefab, they got more character than the endless sea of suburban eyesores we got out there now. 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. The builder was W.L. The Sears Tower is nearly finished. 1227 Disston St, Oxford Circle neighborhood of Philadelphia. Sears could keep manufacturing costs down compared to standard builders and competing catalogs because they had their own manufacturing facilities by then and were able to mass-produce wood, asphalt, insulation material, hardware, and everything else needed to produce a home that wasnt a Habitat for Humanity hut. Andrew is our number-cruncher, and his blog, I joined the team shortly after Lara, Cindy and Andrew began, in earnest, to log the homes that they were finding. The Rossville/No. 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.". Contains merger trees and halo . The mortgage program was also a PR disaster, as many of the families Sears foreclosed upon refused to do further business with the company. Asbury Methodist Village Communications Dept. 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. 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. Buyers could hire a contractor to assemble their home or build it themselves following the detailed instructions that were included. 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. When the. 175, 1911/12 catalog image for the Sears Modern Home No. The original "Sears Modern Homes" community page on Facebook, for those interested in Sears homes. All these years later it is still a fortress.. 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. Simply put, life was rougher. Park, MD. Stamped lumber: Most easily found in unfinished spaces like a basement or attic, framing members were stamped with a letter and a number. 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. Among those chiming in about the article was Judith Chabot of St. Louis, Mo., who runs SearsHouseSeekers.com, which serves as a depository for information gathered by Sears home enthusiasts across the country. Another old model found predominantly in that Lakeview area, was the. Welcome to Sears Homes! 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.. easier. The larger Victorian-style houses that were already there and scant in number were out of reach for working class first-time home buyers. Instead, shipping labels were affixed to the backside of trim that identified properties. [7] Early mortgage loans were typically for 5 to 15 years at 6% to 7% interest. 168/Matoka, 301 Weller Avenue, La Porte, Indiana probable Sears Modern Home No. On another block of W 11th Street, there is an example of the Sears Modern Home No. Andrew is responsible for adding hundreds (and hundreds) of Sears houses to our database, especially in the Maryland suburbs of D.C., in numerous counties in Michigan, and a gold mine of houses in Westchester County, New York, especially in Yonkers. Photo from Lake County Assessor. The house that would soon become the Argyle in one of Yoho's magazines, 1913. According to Betcone, the two models that were the top sellers for Sears in 1930 totaled just over 100 houses a year. Click here. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. 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. national database of sears homes - assuredtriumph.com Our home also resembles the Bedford Model # P3249, 1926 (this was not in your listings). Documented Sears houses have been found across the United States and in a few locations in Canada. 06/16/2022 . Rockstar, Consistent Trees, and Baryon Mass data from the Generation 3 and Generation 6 VELA Simulations. One key set of homes that we are fortunate to have on our list, comes from the research of noted Architectural Historian, Rebecca L. Hunter. And, shortly after me, came Karen DeJeet, a Pittsburgh resident who learned of Sears houses when she found out that she lived in one (the. 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.. 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. [4] Other homeowners relied on local carpenters or contractors to assemble the houses. Remember when Sears sold houses? See some of Ann Arbor's kit homes - mlive 3 in U.S. with, at today's count, 1,963 Sears homes. Natural Resources DataBase - NRDB Despite this large number, Sears houses are still, actually, rare, and only make up about 2% of the houses built in their era. 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. [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]. The truth is out there, and I think you've found it! 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. Andrew spotted these two houses right next to each other, on W 11th Street: a No. They raised four kids in that house, Steel wrote. When the tiny house movement took off, many builders started offering everything from ready-made prehab homes to foundations and blueprints. So this blog has been radio silent for a while now! Dover, Chateau, and Lexington models are particularly plentiful there! This site is a tribute to the original Sears Houses in Cincinnati To see a variety of models similar to the Mitchell, that were offered during the kit-house era, see this article. 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. In fact, the No. 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. Thanks for your interest! Measuring in at a roomy 3,500 square feet, the . The new owner was a Sears House fan - even produced a short doc film about the house and how she updated it. This is the case for the southern New Jersey counties that are suburbs of Philadelphia. Originally marketed as the. Because the various kit home companies often copied plan elements or designs from each other, there are a number of catalog and kit models from different manufacturers that look similar or identical to models offered by Sears. If any of you have ever been interested in coming to see me do a kit home 199 models here in La Porte, are somewhat tweaked in their design, but we still do think that they are examples of that model. Once again true to the companys roots, youre more apt to find Sears catalog homes still standing in former factory towns of the Midwest. [37] Similiar references are made to boyhood homes of Richard Nixon and Warren Buffett. Chabot focuses her research on scouring mortgages and deed records, old newspaper articles and other sources to identify kit homes sold by Sears. Because lets get real: those adorable and affordable ranchers were only for CERTAIN veterans and their families.