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Early mortgage loans were typically for 5 to 15 years at 6% to 7% interest. Sears also offered a plasterboard product similar to modern drywall as an alternative to the plaster and lath wall-building techniques which required skilled carpenters and plasterers. 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.
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According to the authors of Houses by Mail, thousands of Sears Modern homes survive throughout the country. Beginning in the late 1970s, as people began rehabilitating houses built in the early 20th century, some discovered that they owned a Sears home. Interest in studying and restoring the Sears houses has grown over the years.[10] You can use the Kit House Hunters website to see lists of Sears houses in various communities. The Sears house was often equipped with the most sought after conveniences of its time, from built-in china cabinets, mirrored closet doors, dining nooks and kitchen cupboards, to built-in ironing boards, telephone niches, and medicine cabinets. Some of these amenities came as part of the package, while others were options. Modern Homes catalogs often carried designs well past what is generally considered their peak years.
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When Sears first sold stock to the public in 1906, the company was worth some $40 million, with close to $50 million in annual sales and around 9,000 employees. That same year, it built a distribution complex in Chicago with some 3 million square feet of floor space. Sears' retail stores spread across the country and its sales stayed strong even during the Great Depression, as the company spawned now-famous brands like Kenmore, Craftsman and even Allstate Insurance. Their first Modern Homes catalog already had over 40 models to choose from, but Sears would go on to offer 447 different designs.
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"You would order everything from your light fixtures, to your lamp, [the wall covering], kitchen cabinets, the whole thing, whether you get a garage or not. And then it just shipped to you," preservationist Eric Dobson told NPR's Allison Keyes in 2014. Richard Sears, who wrote almost all of the catalog’s copy himself until his retirement in 1908, held to the motto “We Can’t Afford to Lose a Customer,” making sure that Sears stayed competitive in terms of price and value. When in 1908 Sears began its Modern Homes program, the company was in a brilliant position to reach interested people. And the same four-pound catalog that made home purchases possible also contained all necessary furnishments, from living room furniture to bathroom towels. Sears Modern Homes built in the 1930s may have a small circled “SR” cast into the bathtub in the lower corner (furthest from the tub spout and near the floor) and on the underside of the kitchen or bathroom sink. Many of these homes were built in Sears planned “Home Club Plan” developments in New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
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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. That year, the Aladdin Company of Bay City, Michigan, offered the first kit homes through mail order. Sears Modern Homes offered more than 370 designs in a wide range of architectural styles and sizes over the line's 34-year history.
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The homes originally cost between a few hundred dollars and a few thousand. The Martha Washington model, for example, originally sold for $2,688 to $3,727 (or the equivalent of $35,713 to $49,518 today), but in 2016 one sold for more than $1 million. The Sears Modern Homes catalog debuted in 1908, and it offered all the material and blueprints needed to build a house. The pieces that arrived in the mail were meant to fit together sort of like Legos, so buyers could build the houses themselves or hire contractors. The process is reminiscent of the early 1900s, when people turned to mail-order catalogs to find things to buy.
Sears Modern Homes offered more than 370 designs in a wide range of architectural styles and sizes over the line’s 34-year history. From 1908 to 1942, Sears sold more than 70,000 of these houses in North America, by the company’s count. 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 elements that survive from the early period of the Sears complex development are organized around South Homan Avenue, between West Arthington Street and the railroad tracks to the south.
"I can drive five minutes, or I can ride my bike and see six different model homes that are identical to mine," he says. Some mail-order house enthusiasts estimate that about 70 percent of Sears houses are still standing today. A look at the catalog-ordered homes made by Sears from 1908 to 1940.
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These and other house hunters have helped identify nearly 50,000 kit homes from Sears and other companies. So the next time a ragtag team of researchers armed with cameras, laptops and an old Sears catalog knocks on your door asks if they can take a quick tour or your basement, don’t be frightened. 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.
Sears knew its audience well and its designs were those most popular at the time. The company decided not just to sell house-building packages, but to finance them as well. If Sears could offer reasonable interest rates and low down payments, the market seemed endless. Although the financing package initially included only building materials, it soon expanded to cover the building lot. Kushel was managing Sears’s china department in 1906 when he was given the dismal task of overseeing the dismantling of the catalog company’s unwieldy, money-losing building materials department.
These core buildings occupy an area bounded on the north by West Arthington Street, the west by Central Park Avenue, the east by Spaulding Avenue, and the south by West Fillmore Street. Benefiting from Rural Free Delivery, America’s burgeoning westward expansion and an era when background checks didn’t exist, Sears sold guns, in the mail, to anyone. Nothing could be further from the truth now as we see malls with giant Sears anchor stores closing in virtually every city in the USA. Addleman says she’s looked at homes in the Field Club neighborhood and didn’t find any that matched known models of Sears homes.
During the Modern Homes program, large quantities of asphalt shingles became available. Asphalt shingles were cheap to manufacture and ship, and easy and inexpensive to install. Sears also offered a plasterboard product similar to modern drywall (under the name Goodwall) as an alternative to the plaster and lath wall-building techniques which required skilled carpenters and plasterers. This product offered the advantages of low price, ease of installation, and added fire protection. Local building requirements sometimes dictated that certain elements of the house construction be done professionally and varied depending on where the house was constructed.
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. Today, Sears homes remain as popular as ever, especially among history buffs and home investors. If your home was built between 1908 and 1942, compare its floor plan and exterior dimensions against a Sears home field guide, such as “Finding The Houses That Sears Built” (2004, Gentle Beam Publications). You might be surprised to find that you, too, live in a mail-order home.
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