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Around the turn of the 20th century, sales grew swiftly for Sears, and with the opening of its new Chicago mail-order plant in 1906, which sprawled more than three million square feet, the company owned the world’s largest business building. Two years later, the firm introduced its famous mail-order home kits, whole houses that arrived in parts—from the nails to the lumber to the staircases—via railroad. By providing instructions, mass-produced materials and, by 1911, financing, Sears transformed the housing market, making the American dream possible for more than 100,000 buyers.
Sears Homes
• Two flourishing Warner Robins mall anchoring stores and a Perry satellite store as a young married adult. “There are experts out there who are willing to come to people’s homes,” Addleman says. The decades-long rise of Sears, Roebuck & Co. to the country’s largest retailer, and its recent collapse into bankruptcy, reflects more than a shift in American consumer preferences. Rebecca Hunter, author of Putting Sears Homes on the Map, grew up shopping at Sears stores.
Identifying Sears Modern Homes
Home sales slowly recovered as the United States emerged from the Great Depression. As sales grew, Sears expanded its production, shipping, and sales offices to locations across the U.S. To provide the materials needed for the Modern Homes division, Sears operated a lumber mill in Cairo, Illinois. Sears prided itself on offering floor plans that were both efficient and attractive, maximizing the usability of very limited space.
Sears, Roebuck and Company Complex
The smaller houses sometimes combined living and dining rooms, while the smallest made do with a built-in eating nook or the kitchen table. For these, Sears provided building plans and specifications, along with the lumber and any other materials needed. The shipment included everything from nails, screws, and paint to prebuilt building parts, such as staircases and dining nooks. It did not include masonry, such as bricks and cement blocks, which would be cheaper to procure locally than to send by rail.
Sears prefabricated almost all of these homes in giant mills situated across the country. The lumber came pre-cut, kind of like a giant Ikea set, along with an instruction booklet. This seal was to be broken on arrival by the new owner, who would open up their boxcar to find over 10,000 pieces of framing lumber, 20,000 cedar shakes, and almost everything else needed to build the home — all the doors, even the doorknobs. At one point in history, you could get just about anything courtesy of the Sears catalog—even a home, as Popular Mechanics reports.
Homes
This system uses precut timberof mostly standard 2_4s and 2_8s for framing. Precut timber, fitted pieces, andthe convenience of having everything, including the nails, shipped by railroaddirectly to the customer added greatly to the popularity of this framing style. Sears was instead a very ablefollower of popular home designs but with the added advantage of modifyinghouses and hardware according to buyer tastes. Individuals could even designtheir own homes and submit the blueprints to Sears, which would then ship offthe appropriate precut and fitted materials, putting the home owner in fullcreative control. Modern Home customers had the freedom to build their own dreamhouses, and Sears helped realize these dreams through quality custom design andfavorable financing. In fact, by the end of the 1930s, the number of Sears retail stores had nearly doubled, and in 1945 the company topped the $1 billion mark in sales for the first time.
And — amazingly, for the time — they could even order homes via catalog. Even in the depths of the Great Depression in 1931, Sears’ catalog, retail and factory profits totaled more than $12 million, or more than $201 million in 2018 dollars. That year marked the first year retail sales outstripped catalog sales. In 1932, the company opened its famous flagship store on State and Van Buren Streets in the Loop district of Chicago. By 1907, Sears and Roebuck were selling the then equivalent of $1.3 billion of merchandise to American families every year.
Here's When a Sears Kit House Is (and Isn't) Worth Saving - Apartment Therapy
Here's When a Sears Kit House Is (and Isn't) Worth Saving.
Posted: Tue, 17 Oct 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
A Sears Roebuck house ©
Sears discontinued its Modern Homes catalog after 1940, though sales through local sales offices continued into 1942. Years later, the sales records related to home sales were destroyed during a corporate house cleaning. As only a small percentage of these homes were documented when built, finding these houses today often requires detailed research to properly identify them. 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. Determining which company manufactured a particular catalog and kit home may require additional research to determine the origin of that home.
What Style Is That House? Visual Guides to Domestic Architectural Designs
Sears stopped the mortgage program in 1934 as a result of the Great Depression. The Modern Homes program itself ended in 1940, undone by loan defaults and pre-World War II shortages of building materials. Like many other retailers, Sears was severely impacted by the Great Depression.
The Aladdin Company was just one competitor already testing the waters with such an idea, and Sears quickly followed the same path. Some of these homes were based on models offered in the Sears Modern Homes catalog. Others were not but were still pre-cut kit homes built from plans and materials from Sears. The first Sears, Roebuck & Co. calendar hit mailboxes in 1894 and was followed over the next few years by specialty catalogs and color sections. Customers would receive a railcar filled with precut lumber and the necessary supplies and instructions to build a home, or hire a company to perform the assembly, at a fraction of the cost of a custom-built house.
But its competitors were gaining ground, and by 1991 Sears had lost its crown as the nation’s top-selling retailer to Walmart. After years of declining sales, Sears would finally close its Modern Homes department in 1940. A few other kit home manufacturers — ones that hadn’t sold mortgages — survived, but the Sears kit home boom was over. Then came World War II, and with it, the next modern housing boom, featuring the rise of the suburbs and the prefab home — the kinds of homes we know today. Montgomery Ward also sold pre-cut house materials and plans from 1909 to 1932.
In 1940, because of loan defaults and shortages of building materials, the Modern Homes program ended. Between 1908 and 1940, nearly 75,000 homeowners picked out a house from the Sears, Roebuck and Company’s Modern Homes catalog and built their houses from the materials that arrived a few weeks later. The houses ranged in size from small cottages without a bathroom to multi-story homes complete with sleeping porches and porte-cocheres. Everything you – or your favorite contractor – needed to build the home, except for stone and bricks, was included in your purchase.
Featured in catalogs from 1912 to 1929, the Westly was one of Sears’ most popular designs. It still shines in countless towns across the country by the hundreds, if not thousands. These stamps are normally located on or near the ends of pieces of framing timber. However, these stamps were not used on lumber shipped before 1916, when Sears first started offering pre-cut lumber. Because these homes were constructed using pre-cut lumber and plans provided by Sears, these homes can be considered to be “Sears Modern Homes”. Many of these post 1940 homes were based on models from the 1940 and earlier Sears catalogs but not all were, leading to debate over whether these homes qualify as “Sears Modern Homes”.
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