Rebecca Hunter - Mail-Order Homes: Sears Homes and Other Kit Houses

The Sears Alhambra, such as this Peotone, Illinois, example, was a Mission Revival design. It had the same floor plan as the Dutch Colonial Revival Martha Washington, (see ) evidencing standardized design.

Pacific Homes 1923 model #385 was copied by Sears and sold as the Del Rey.

The cover of the 1928 Wardway Homes catalog featured the popular Dutch Colonial Cambridge model.

T HE MOST intriguing oral history associated with a home is, perhaps, This house came on the train. A train pulls into the station and leaves two boxcars on a landing. Inside are all the materials needed to construct an entire house. The framing boards are cut to size at the mill to facilitate rapid and accurate construction. The purchaser has chosen the model, selected door and window styles, specified the desired types of wood, decided on the exterior cladding, and even selected the paint colors. These well-designed, practical homes were made of top-quality materials. This is a mail-order kit home.

These homes were marketed on a large scale by mail-order catalog from 190683. Eight major U. S. companies and a host of small companies with only local distribution sold such homes primarily in the United States but also in Canada. Aladdin Company once shipped an entire village of homes to Birmingham, England, to provide housing for workers at the Austin Motor car factory.

The catalogs were updated, usually annually, to allow for the addition of newer styles of homes and the deletion of unpopular models, and to accommodate price changes. Companies also placed advertisements in national magazines and newspapers in major cities as a way to promote their homes.

Over time, various terms were used to describe these homes. In a circa 1907 catalog, Aladdin Company advertised the original Knocked-Down Houses, with every piece cut to right length, breadth and thickness and planed on all four sides. Sears, Roebuck used the terms cut and fitted, while Gordon-Van Tine featured the ready-cut system, and Pacific Homes dubbed their models Ready-Cut houses. Harris Brothers described their kit homes as Cut-to-Fit. Lewis and Sterling used no such descriptive terms, but referred to their product as Lewis-Built Homes or homes Built by the Sterling System.

The homes were copies of the U. S. house styles most popular during the period 190080. Despite widespread sales of thousands of mail-order homes, they are rare when compared to the total number of homes built. Aladdin sales of 2,800 homes in 1918 comprised 2.3 percent of the 118,000 U. S. housing starts that year.

The popular 1930 Montgomery Ward Cranford model is, architecturally speaking, a Dutch Colonial Revival design with a Tudoresque gable added on the front.

Precut housing thrived until after World War II, when government regulation of the U. S. housing industry, tract housing construction methods, and increased popularity of prefabricated and mobile housing meant that precut housing companies could no longer compete financially.

The mail-order house company provided blueprints and construction materials. Lumber was provided either in bulk or as precut framing boards. The latter were known as kit homes. One source provided the buyer with all the materials required to build a house: lumber, roofing, doors and windows, flooring, trim boards, hardware, nails, clapboard or cedar shingles for the exterior siding, and enough paint and varnish to put two coats on everything. Of course, an instruction book was included to ensure that the structure was built properly.

This well-maintained Cranford is located in Charleston, West Virginia. (Photograph by Rosemary Thornton)

This Argyle built in Lexington, Kentucky, has been authenticated by a Sears, Roebuck mortgage record. (Photograph by Dale Wolicki)

As in homes built by standard methods, framing boards were customarily hard southern yellow pine. Flooring in living and dining rooms was typically oak, with maple and/or fir in the other rooms. Trim boards usually matched the flooring. Masonry such as brick and stucco could be chosen as an exterior finish for any design, but this was obtained locally, and the price was adjusted accordingly.

One-story homes with two or three bedrooms predominated mail-order home catalogs. The Sears, Roebuck Argyle model with its Arts and Crafts porch columns was built in many locations such as Bridgeport, Connecticut; Rantoul, Illinois; Kokomo, Indiana; Thornton, Iowa; Somerset, Kentucky; Bladensburg, Maryland; and Detroit, Michigan.

Lewis, another Bay City, Michigan, company, offered this Rowland model in the 1950s.

Materials were shipped primarily by rail, but also by boat, depending on the locations of the supplier and purchaser. Most customers ordered from the closest supplier, as the buyer usually paid the freight charges.

Researchers are lucky when a mailorder home identified in 2000 still looks exactly like its 1923 catalog image. Gordon-Van Tines model #562, an American Foursquare design, was popular in the early 1920s.

This Mid-Century Modern Ranch design from the 1954 Aladdin Company catalog is shown with the optional scenic window. Acknowledging that ranch-style designs evolved from architecture of the southwestern United States, Aladdin named this model El Rancho.

The mail-order companys responsibility ended with the arrival of the sealed boxcars at the railway depot. The purchaser had several days to unload the material. In the early years, materials most commonly were hauled to the building site using a horse and wagon; later, motor vehicles were used. The majority of building sites appear to have been close to a railroad, but one purchaser is known to have hauled the materials for his house by horse and wagon from the Gordon-Van Tine plant on the Mississippi River in Davenport, Iowa, sixty miles east across the plains to his farm in Illinois.